Eg 14 digital

NO. 14, 2015

NO. 14, 2015

eg EXPERIENTIAL GRAPHICS MAGAZINE WWW.SEGD.ORG

DIGITAL + PHYSICAL 2015 SEGD FELLOW BEST OF SHOW SEGD GLOBAL DESIGN AWARDS

DONALD MEEKER

PLATFORM SUMMIT

SYLVIA HARRIS AWARD

#TRASHTAG

Society for Experiential Graphic Design A multidisciplinary community creating experiences that connect people to place

SEGD BOARD OF DIRECTORS President Vice President Treasurer

Jill Ayers, Design360, New York John Lutz, Selbert Perkins Design, Chicago Patrick Angelel, CREO Industrial Arts, Everett, Wash.

Steve Bayer, Daktronics, Brookings, S.D. Jody Graff (Ex Officio), Drexel University, Philadelphia Cynthia Hall, Seattle J. Graham Hanson, Graham Hanson Design, New York Alan Jacobson, ex;it, Philadelphia George Lim, Tangram Design, Denver (Ex Officio) Amy Lukas (Past President), Infinite Scale, Salt Lake City Bryan Meszaros, OpenEye, South Amboy, N.J. Stephen Minning, BrandCulture Communications, Sydney Steven Stamper, fd2s, Austin, Texas Gary Stemler, archetype, Minneapolis Julie Vogel, Kate Keating Associates, San Francisco

SEGD CHAPTER CHAIRS Atlanta Austin Boston Brisbane, Australia Charlotte, NC

Chicago Cincinnati Cincinnati Dallas Edinburgh Jacksonville Kansas City London Los Angeles Minneapolis

New York

Philadelphia Portland San Diego San Francisco Seattle Toronto Vancouver Washington, D.C. Wellington, New Zealand

2 — eg magazine

Lynne Bernhardt, lbdesign@bellsouth.net Stephen Carlin, stevecarlin@coopercarry.com Jason Helton, jhelton@snallc.com Mitch Leathers, mleathers@snallc.com Michele Phelan, michele@96pt.com Sam Pease, spease@spdeast.com Jack Bryce, jack@jackbryce.com Kelley Bozarth, kelley.bozarth@littleonline.com Kevin Kern, kkern@505design.com Scott Muller, SMuller@trademarkvisual.com Julie Maggos, j.maggos@interiorarchitects.com Hannah Anderson, handerson@msaarch.com Margaret Vennemeyer, mvennemeyer@bhdp.com Hannah Anderson, handerson@msaarch.com Margaret Vennemeyer, mvennemeyer@bhdp.com Pamela Abeyta, pamela@valiantdesigners.com Austin Frith, afrith@dfwairport.com Lucy Richards, lr@studiolr.com Steve Williams, steve@harbingersign.com Carol Lombardo, flagalpal@gmail.com Rick Smith, rsmith@dimin.com Simon Borg, simon.borg@populous.com Kris Helmick, kris@huntdesign.com Mohamed Khalfan, mo@signsandservicesco.com Gretta Fry, gretta.fry@spye.co Adam Halverson, adamh@serigraphicssign.com Jese Yungner, yungner@visualcomm.com Rachel Einsidler, einsidler.r@design360inc.com Anthony Ferrara, anthony@designconcernus.com Anna Sharp, asharp@twotwelve.com Stephen Bashore, sbashore@cloudgehshan.com Ian Goldberg, igoldberg@cloudgehshan.com Kathy Fry, kathy@mayerreed.com Mike Sauer, msauer@mayerreed.com Chris McCampbell, chris@kathydavisassociates.com Brian Dyches, bdyches@openeyeglobal.com to San Diego Tim Huey, tim_huey@gensler.com Danielle Lindsay, danielle.lindsay@som.com Cynthia Hall, hallcynthia1@comcast.net Annelle Stotz, a.stotz@interiorarchitects.com Cynthia Damar-Schnobb, cynthia@entro.com Andrew Kuzyk, andrew@entro.com Daniela Pilossof, daniela.pilossof@gmail.com Jeffrey Wotowiec, jwotowiec@cannondesign.com Nick Kapica, n.kapica@massey.ac.nz

Publisher Clive Roux, CEO Editor-in-Chief Pat Matson pat@segd.org Executive Editor Ann Makowski Founding Editor Leslie Gallery Dilworth Design James Pittman Executive and Editorial Offices 1900 L St., NW Suite 710 Washington, D.C. 20036 202.638.5555 www.segd.org Advertising Sales Kristin Bennani kristin@segd.org 202.713.0413 Kathleen Turner kathleen@segd.org 703.657.9171 Editorial, Subscriptions, Reprints, Back Issues 202.638.5555 segd@segd.org eg magazine is the international journal of SEGD, the Society for Experiential Graphic Design. Opinions expressed editorially and by contributors are not necessarily those of SEGD. Advertisements appearing in eg magazine do not constitute or imply endorsement by SEGD or eg magazine.

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Digital + Physical in the Real World In a world increasingly enabled by digital technology, designers are still learning how to integrate electronic and traditional media. We know, of course, that digital technology can’t replace physical environments. But it can certainly make the “real” world more enjoyable when it enhances the user experience. And experiential graphic designers in particular are getting better and better at leveraging its enormous potential for content and connectivity.

Winning projects in the 2015 SEGD Global Design Awards—from a volcano museum in Iceland to a poetic public installation in Atlanta and an enchanted forest in Quebec—use both sophisticated digital technology and traditional tools to tell stories, build brands, and create a strong sense of place.

“Sometimes we saw digital technology inserted into projects without any recognizable purpose,” says Graham Hanson, GHD | Graham Hanson Design (New York), chair of the 2015 design awards jury. “But refreshingly, we also saw some examples where designers understood the lack of necessity for electronic media and developed the design successfully without it.”

Artist and design educator Nik Hafermaas, also on the design awards jury, says the submissions reflected a sea change happening in digital technology. “We’re now in the second digital revolution,” he notes. “The first one has many of us glued to our small and large screens, and the second one will liberate us from them and reconnect us with the physical world in meaningful, beautiful ways. That’s what we saw in the Design Awards work.”

We hope you’ll see it too. Enjoy.

Clive Roux CEO The 2015 SEGD Global Design Awards jury (clockwise from top): Michael Donovan, Donovan and Green (New York); Lana Rigsby, Rigsby Hull (Houston); Kristine Matthews, Studio Matthews (Seattle); Jody Graff, Drexel University (Philadelphia); Graham Hanson, Graham Hanson Design (New York); Javier Lloret, interaction designer (Rotterdam); Nik Hafermaas, Ueberall/Art Center College of Design (Los Angeles); Anthony Vitagliano, Digital Kitchen (Chicago); Stephen Minning (center), BrandCulture (Sydney).

© 2015 eg magazine SSN: 1551-4595

On the cover: Wushang Zhongyan Mall International Cinema, Wuhan, China (2015 Merit winner) eg magazine — 3

SEGD FELLOW

BEST OF SHOW

20 Up in the Air Pentagram takes inspiration from Archigram’s Walking City concept to create a bold yet budget-friendly graphics program for a technology conference.

10 A Clear View By anyone’s standards, the work of Don Meeker—activist and information designer— has touched the lives of more people than any other designer in his era.

4 — eg magazine

HONOR AWARDS

28 The Social City 2015 Sylvia Harris Award For an Atlanta arts festival, Second Story explores a radical new interface for social media: being there.

32 Exploring Eldheimar At a museum dedicated to the wrath of a volcano, interactive experiences help visitors explore the site and make peace with the worst natural disaster in Iceland’s history.

MERIT AWARDS

36 Selfie Bridge Lincoln, Nebraska, creates its own photo op with a new bridge that uses environmental graphics to celebrate the city.

42 Best in Class Holmes Wood takes architectural cues to create a witty, modern wayfinding system for Oxford Brookes University.

46 Ting and the Art of Performance Exhibition At Oslo’s Museum of Technology, Ralph Appelbaum Associates creates a new kind of participatory museum experience.

52 Merit Awards From a Latvian museum to a corporate heritage exhibit, Merit Award winners connect people to place.

eg magazine — 5

Thanks to our supporters 2015 Industry Partners

2015 Friends of SEGD Gallagher & Associates fd2s Foreseer University of Cincinnati

2015 SEGD Program Sponsors

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SEGD FELLOW

Don Meeker Meeker & Associates

SEGD FELLOW

A Clear View By anyone’s standards, the work of Don Meeker—activist and information designer—has touched the lives of more people than any other in his era.

10 — eg magazine

The Clearview type system for U.S. highways was focused on improving legibility for aging drivers and improving the quality of the roadscape. Developed in collaboration with James Montalbano of Terminal Design Inc. and research partners Martin Pietrucha and Phil Garvey of the Larson Transportation Institute at PennState, it has been implemented in more than 25 states.

D

2015 SEGD FELLOW

DON MEEKER

Tell us a little about your growing-up years in Oregon, and how that has impacted your life and work.

My brother and I were typical Oregon boys through and through: we biked, climbed mountains, backpacked, and raced small sailboats. We both got our ironworker union cards at 18 to earn money for college (then $112 a term) at the University of Oregon.

We were very different but very close. He was a bright guy, got his PhD in economics and went on to be a chief economist on public health at the AMA. I was a learning-disabled kid who could not write a simple sentence and even in high school my mom would sit up at night reading to me to get me through my literature assignments. I took art classes and majored in art in college, with a minor in social sciences. I wanted to study graphics, but it wasn’t offered.

How did you first become interested in design?

One extremely important influence came when I was 13 years old, in 1960. A Portland architect named Louis Krutcher gave a lecture at the Multnomah County Library, proposing to paint the bridges crossing the Willamette River in various colors to celebrate

rive along a U.S. highway or navigate the roads or waterways of a national park, and chances are high you’ll come into contact with the work of Don Meeker. His impact in public-sector graphic design spans more than four decades, and includes not only development of Clearview, the typeface that improves roadway sign legibility for an aging U.S. population, but development of type standards for the National Park Service and signs and symbols for parks, waterways, and recreation areas across the country.

“Don is an EGD visionary,” says Richard Burns, FSEGD, a cofounder of SEGD and founder of GNU Group and GNU2 Consulting.

“He was a pioneer in thinking systemically about signage and how to create cohesive programs for complex projects.”

the shapes and the crossing. He proposed upgrading the area around the historic Skidmore Fountain, then a tired part of Skid Row in what was “old town,” and in another project, removing a mass of power poles in a traffic island at a primary entrance to the city and creating a landscaped portal.

The City of Portland bought his ideas and I consider this to be an awakening, as the projects he created were what Malcolm Gladwell would call “tipping points.”

Seeing the impact of that magic touch he laid on the land was for me indelible. Portland at that time was not that self-aware and this was civic work, done in the public interest, that aroused an awareness of the place.

You were an activist from early on. How did that get started, and how did it impact your work?

While in college I was moved by the Kerner Commission report on Civil Disobedience that followed the 1967 riots. Immediately after college graduation, I became a Vista volunteer and was assigned to an anti-poverty agency in Gary, Indiana. It was a two-year stint that included working with street gangs and participating in a successful effort to stop a new coal-fired

Spanning a career that began in the 1970s, Meeker has built a legacy of creating design solutions that improve human lives. He is recognized not only for his activist approach to design—dating from his early days as a Vista volunteer—but his systematic design methodology and his focus on human factors research, says Chris Calori, FSEGD, Calori & Vanden-Eynden.

“Don has incorporated human factors research into his design solutions, perhaps most notably in his co-development of the Clearview type family. Don’s work represents EGD at its best: positively influencing peoples’ lives thorough systematic, methodical design solutions.”

Meeker spoke to eg magazine after his recognition at the SEGD Fellows celebration during the 2015 SEGD Conference: Experience Chicago in June.

power plant on lands that are now a national park. Based on that work, I was invited to Washington, D.C., and worked there for a couple of years with activist planning organizations to stop the I-95 hook-up through northeast Washington and other development that would have negatively impacted neighborhoods there.

What was your entrée to working as a designer?

I went to Pratt for a year in what was their attempt at a graduate program.

It was a difficult time for Pratt and it was not what it is today, but it got me to New York City. I was fortunate to be offered freelance work with my teachers. I also built what became a very large library of books, including the work of a number of the early SEGD Fellows. I was cobbling a way to enter the field, with very little formal training.

I was always interested in the public statement: in cities, and outside.

My thesis was on design as a management tool and I chose the City of Newark as my “patient.”

I redesigned the look of the city vehicle fleet, collaborated with a team of young engineers on a management plan, and got the city to support the restoration of City Hall eg magazine — 11

SEGD FELLOW

“I consider myself someone who tries to make a broad public difference by way of my work, even if that is invisible to others.”

(a 1904 Beaux Arts building) as part of a painters union training program I put together. In this branding program I redesigned stationery and various documents for information management, and attempted a grossly failed project to restore city parks. But this experience got me a real job.

I was fortunate to be hired by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn in 1979 (then a well regarded small firm) to work on their public design projects for the US DOT, the FAA, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That evolved into some larger projects.

Do you still consider yourself an activist?

Am I still using the tools I learned as a student at Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation? No. I don’t have time and I’ve learned that the specialist must contribute the product that other activists can take forward. I consider myself someone who tries to make a broad public difference by way of my work, even if that is invisible to others.

A case in point has been signage for cycling. I became very aware of the added clutter created by a new layer of signing for cycling when riding all over NYC with my youngest son 12 years ago.

Six years ago we began working on signing for cycling. I started this because I believed we could improve the FHWA standards.

Cycling had become huge compared to when the FHWA standard was placed in the highway manual in 12 — eg magazine

1979. We prepared new designs and I organized 20+ key players (three research universities, the major cycling planning companies, all the national bike advocacy organizations, city traffic engineers, a member of Congress, etc.). In the end, I realized that there was nothing I could do with their involvement until we raised funds and got the research done to validate the designs.

This is lonely work and I do it because it’s important. If I stop, no one cares. Everyone is too busy with their own thing and road sign activism is too complex to be a rallying point unless we provide a cookbook to get it done.

Tell us about the human impacts your work has had.

With 25+ states and hundreds of cities using Clearview, we feel that this can make a difference.

I believe we can change the way roads are signed nationwide in a comprehensive way and that will not only improve the aesthetics of the roadscape and look of cities, it will save lives.

When we designed a sign program for the 2,500 U.S. Corps of Engineers recreation sites, we were asked to solve a very unusual problem: try to help reduce the 500 fatalities that were occurring on rivers and waterways managed by the Corps every year. Working with Leslie Blum, we studied the causes and types of accidents, the placement of warning messages on waterways (where the panel is

never viewed from the same angle), and the management of messages; we worked with 3M on materials that would radiate at dawn and dusk without illumination; we engineered structures; we worked with specialists from vision experts to admiralty lawyers. This system design has been credited with cutting fatalities by 75% (375 lives a year, or about 7,500 in the last 20 years and counting).

The work with the Corps allowed us to get the assignment to design sign standards for the National Park Service. Each project builds on the past. In 2009, we started Terrabilt, Inc. This is a design firm focused on developing signage for park systems. We also manufacture signage (some internal but most by contract) that is sustainable and “green.”

Your work has often focused on the use of type to help users navigate environments. What attracted you to typography?

I worked for a classical firm (D&B).

I have always been a heavy reader. I evolved into type with great respect for the masters.

For me, type is the brand on most projects. For park agencies this is a challenge, as they want to put their logo on everything and we try to minimize that needless (counter-productive) exercise.

The National Park Service was wedded to Helvetica. Finding a way to move away from Helvetica for park signing was a difficult process.

Working with James Montalbano,

NPS Roadway Yosemite National Park Grand Canyon National Park Yellowstone National Park Shenandoah National Park

NPS Rawlinson Roadway

NPS Rawlinson Book

NPS Rawlinson Book Italic

NPS Rawlinson Medium

NPS Rawlinson Medium Italic

NPS Rawlinson Bold

Everglades National Park Fort McHenry National Monument

NPS Rawlinson Bold Italic

Mesa Verda National Park Mt. Lassen National Park

Meeker’s firm created the sign system for Grand Canyon National Park (a World Heritage Site), including a modular assembly for shuttle bus maps and supporting schedules and route diagrams.

NPS Rawlinson Heavy

NPS Rawlinson Heavy Italic

Meeker and type designer James Montalbano developed NPS Rawlinson as part of new sign standards for the park service. Human factors research showed Rawlinson was more legible and effective for road signs. New text weights were designed for all other applications (information graphics, print, web, interpretive exhibits, etc.) and transformed the way NPS uses type across all media.

At the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, Meeker & Associates created contextual signing based on the gorge’s basalt geologic formations and the arched shapes used in handcrafted trail bridges.

At Independence National Historical Park, Meeker created a family of sign types for a walking experience. Sign structures are contemporary versions of colonial tavern sign frames.

eg magazine — 13

SEGD FELLOW

Guide signing for Dayton International Airport used threads of color with text to direct motorists to the desired destination.

The system was also “green,” as it was printed using 3M European standards, with durable VOC-free graphic production and solvent-free structural coatings.

we conducted a series of workshops in which we finally got the NPS to vocalize their difficulty in using Helvetica and to allow us to show them options. Those options were all classic typefaces that were not what they needed, but once we had the opportunity to develop a new type system, the way the agency used type was completely transformed.

We were flying blind and just trying to ask the right questions and then execute in a very classical way. I will note that the solution (the development of the Rawlinson typeface) was guided by the requirements of reading in the environment. Our print version followed. We were unsuccessful on the sans-serif recommendation, as they could not move too far beyond Helvetica, and only went to Frutiger.

What are the projects or achievements that have most impacted the trajectory of your work?

I am not sure it was a trajectory.

Truth be known, I was quite surprised by the SEGD award. I feel confident in the work I do and work hard to put meat on the bones of a project without superficial decoration, but I don’t see myself as having a trajectory. After 20

14 — eg magazine

years doing landmark work on road signing, none of the 25+ states that use our typefaces or reference our studies have called to partner or for questions.

I was thrown at the Corps of Engineers in 1982 and told to design a sign standard for 2,500 facilities for an 85-member review committee. From that effort, the waterway signage plan is credited with saving 7,500 lives with no real public celebration.

Our work to design a wayfinding system for Independence National Historical Park in downtown Philadelphia is very understated and fits perfectly into this World Heritage Site. It is probably one of the most sensitive and appropriate projects we ever did. The product was a fight with the NPS all the way.

Getting it done was like a vacation in the Ukraine. I’m very proud of what I did but it seems like trajectory is a funny word in that a lot of what we do is quite personal.

If you were building a legacy, what would you want it to be?

What would you want people to say about your body of work?

My legacy is changing the way roads are signed in a comprehensive way. Road signs are the single most ever-present manifestation

of government anyone touches on a daily basis as a motorist, cyclist, or pedestrian. So my legacy and my contribution have been in changing that system, primarily with Clearview. My work on the Corps waterway project, which has been credited with saving so many lives, is also something I’m proud of.

What do you enjoy outside work?

I hike and cycle but my primary interest is sailing. I race (a J-27) every Wednesday night and I’m active in our 106-year-old sailing club north of the Tappan Zee on the Hudson.

I’m a heavy periodical reader.

I try to get through The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal daily, hopefully two articles from the New Yorker and something from the Nation every week, and would never think of canceling the paper if on a trip for a couple weeks. Regrettably, I do not read fiction or big books.

I watch less than four hours of television a year (sans presidential debate years).

What would you have done all this time if you hadn’t become a designer?

There was no Plan B. Building this knowledge from scratch has been a long road!

In 2009 Meeker established Terrabilt, which focuses on sustainable “green-manufactured” signage and structures for parks.

Meeker’s design of a new system to identify dangerous chemicals in the workplace was studied by a human factors lab at Purdue University and showed more than significant improvement over current standards. It received AIGA’s Design for Understanding Award and was placed in their centennial archive.

Meeker used historic colors and framing devices for the signage for the Historic River Towns of Westchester, which covers a dozen towns along the east side of the Hudson River.

eg magazine — 15

16 — eg magazine

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BEST OF SHOW

Environmental Graphics Platform Summit 2014

Project Area ~170,000 sq. ft.

BEST OF SHOW

Open Date October 2014 Design Pentagram

Platform Summit 2014

Design Team Eddie Opara (partner in charge and designer), Ken Deegan (designer), Pedro Mendes (designer), Carrie Brody (project coordinator)

Platform Morehouse College, Atlanta

Up in the Air Pentagram takes inspiration from Archigram’s Walking City concept to create a bold yet budget-friendly graphics program for Platform Summit.

By Jenny S. Reising

20 — eg magazine

H

ow do you create a high-impact experiential graphics program for a nascent conference centered on technology when the budget is small and there is nowhere to actually put signage?

That was the problem Pentagram faced when designing the collateral, wayfinding, and digital experience for the second annual Platform Summit, a 2.5-day TED-inspired conference aimed at diversifying the innovation economy and promoting minority entrepreneurship in technology.

Like TED, the Summit features presentations by influential leaders in technology, business, and culture.

Unlike TED, the speakers are predominantly women and people of color.

The first Platform Summit, in 2013, took place at MIT’s Media Lab, a sleek, all-white space that allowed for oversized white, black, and gray graphics that bled from the walls to the floors. The 2014 Summit’s move to the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center at Atlanta’s Morehouse College—a historically black college in a city that has become a hub for burgeoning African American technologists—made sense given Platform’s focus on minorities.

However, a distinct lack of wall space, the building’s classic brick architecture, and restrictions against hanging signage or wrapping columns forced Pentagram to think outside the building.

“We were looking at classic university architecture that didn’t reflect technology, and we had a

Collaborators Kamhi Kolor (signage and wayfinding fabrication), Special Projects Inc. (stage fabrication), Balloons Over Atlanta (inflatables installation), Robert Hodgin (computational code for live graphics), Bit Studio (stage visualization developers), Molly Heintz (strategy) Photos Pentagram

problem with that,” explains Eddie Opara, Pentagram partner in charge.

“How do we place this conference in this space and make it look like a hub of inspiration?” Platform came up with the idea of creating oversized tents and canopies outside where conferencegoers could mingle, and that’s when a light bulb went off in Opara’s head.

“I just walked into the office one day and said, ‘Inflatables!’ For me, it signified exactly what we needed to do: use inflatables to convey what was happening at Platform, and create exterior graphics that would be visible from a distance and have a glorious impact,” says Opara.

His inspiration for the balloons was an idea proposed by architect Ron Herron of the avant garde 1960s architecture group Archigram. Herron’s 1964 Walking City concept proposed massive, robotic buildings designed to travel on land and sea. The notion of recycling a futuristic idea from the past also tied in nicely with Platform’s focus on celebrating innovation.

Those balloons—including two 10-foot-diameter and twelve 5-footdiameter black balloons with white type—became the centerpiece of Platform Summit’s graphics program.

Inspiring words such as “innovate,” “envision,” “inspire,” “create,” and “diversify” were printed on the balloons, which were filled with helium and tethered to the ground at varying heights. A 25-foot zeppelin emblazoned with the Platform logo hovered 100 feet above the campus.

To help guide conference-goers around the venue, Pentagram designed two 7-foot-tall-by-3-foot-diameter

To heighten visibility for the 2014 Platform Summit at Morehouse College, Pentagram emblazoned the Platform logo on black balloons and a 25-foot zeppelin hovering over campus.

Placing signage inside the conference venue was problematic, so Pentagram took the graphics program outside. Oversized black helium-ďŹ lled balloons were a visual beacon to conference-goers.

eg magazine — 21

“A strong identity that plays out very effectively across a wide range of scales and materials. Love the use of inflatables for a short-term event— it manages to make balloons look incredibly sophisticated. ” —Jury comment

cylindrical black directories. Simple directional signage was provided by 4-foot-tall-by-1-footdiameter black cylinders topped with balloons imprinted with arrows, leading the congregation and speakers back into the auditorium through different doors.

Pentagram used Platform’s futuristic, technological-looking brand font—ThreeSix11 by MuirMcNeil—for identity graphics, iconography, and arrows, and New Rail for directory signage and collateral materials.

Taking cues from the inaugural Summit’s graphic scheme—white with black type—Pentagram specified black signage with white graphics.

“We used black and white not just because it references race and ethnicity, but also because it’s straightforward, cheap, and simple, and you can be very much engaged with it,” Opara says. The color scheme is also a neutral counterpoint to Platform’s “color-crazy” collateral, also designed by Pentagram, allowing the website and program materials to pop out against the black-and-white experiential graphics.

For the auditorium, Platform wanted a highimpact, technology-driven concept that would heighten the focus on the stage. So the designers conceived two 20-foot-high black screens with white LEDs flanking the stage and displaying live visualizations of the speakers. Using Cinder, a free, open-source software program, Pentagram transmitted live video of the speakers from a highdefinition camera to the LED screens, creating responsive, dynamic, real-time graphics of the speakers as they moved around the stage. During group presentations, an image of each speaker’s face was created and built out in particles that diverged from the center of the image.

As with any design project, the Summit program had its share of challenges. The shoestring budget and short time frame—three months from

22 — eg magazine

concept to completion—were among them. Kamhi Kolor, which fabricated the balloons, zeppelin, and directional signage, also had to go through a bit of trial and error to make the graphics look seamless.

For example, to minimize the appearance of lines in the 19 vinyl-wrapped custom cardboard Uline tubes, Kamhi Color President Al Kamhi says his team had to wrap them with another material first, then cap and seal them. Losing a planned second, 30-foot zeppelin during shipping was also a setback.

However, attendance at the Morehouse Summit doubled from the previous year’s Summit at MIT, from 257 to 540, and Platform founder and President Hank Williams says the graphics program contributed to that success.

“People go to conferences all the time and the signage is usually functional. But when they saw the blimp 100 feet in the air, giant balloons, and 20-foot interactive LED screens, they were pretty much blown away,” says Williams. In fact, Opara says that at the closing of the conference, Williams called the designers on stage to thank them for their work, and they received rapturous applause from the audience.

“That has never, ever happened before. We’re usually the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain and actually, I kind of like it like that.”

Pentagram is dreaming up graphics for the 2015 Summit, which will be hosted by Morehouse College again, but Opara says the already low budget has been trimmed and he’s not sure he can up the ante from last year. “It might be better, or not as good, but it’s definitely going to be different,” he promises.

Williams is more confident. “At the end of every Summit, I wonder how we can improve for the next year, because it was amazing. But then you get into it and start something new, and you know, absolutely, it’s going to be bigger.”

Jenny Reising is a Cincinnati-based writer and editor.

Black balloons imprinted with arrows in Platform’s distinct ThreeSix11 font guided visitors at key exit and entry points.

Two 7-foot-tall by 3-footdiameter directional cylinders featured wraparound graphics to guide attendees around the Summit.

Pentagram transmitted live video from a highdeďŹ nition camera to two 20-ft.-high LED screens on stage, creating responsive, dynamic, real-time graphics of the speakers as they moved around.

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Signs

Retail Exteriors

Fixtures

Displays

Exhibits

Visitors Centers

Bethlehem Steel Mill Hoover-Mason Trail Interpretive Walkway Graphics are embedded into steel to make one integral sign. The sign graphics and materials complement the architecture of the mile long historic steel mill.

Client: Bethlehem Redevelopment Authority Designer: Bluecadet (Lead Architect: WRT)

Historical interpretive signage was a very critical piece for our project, and we are very pleased with Direct Embed for their professionalism and integrity within a very tight schedule.

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HONOR AWARDS

#Trashtag (Sylvia Harris Award) Eldheimar Volcano Museum Exhibit Interactives Haymarket Pedestrian Bridge Graphics Oxford Brookes University WayďŹ nding TING: Technology & Democracy Exhibit

HONOR AWARD #Trashtag

The Sylvia Harris Award Sylvia Harris (1953-2011), the founder and principal of Citizen Research & Design, was a passionate advocate of design for the public good. The Sylvia Harris Award honors her work and her legacy.

Goat Farm Arts Center Atlanta

#Trashtag, part of the Atlanta arts festival Elevate 2014, was a commentary on social media, staged in a dumpster.

T

The Social City For an Atlanta arts festival, Second Story explores a radical new interface for social media: being there.

By Pat Matson

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he City of Atlanta is one of many urban centers that have discovered the power of art to spur economic growth and vitality. Elevate Atlanta is an annual pop-up art festival designed to create connections and invite people to engage with one another and the city in its various neighborhoods.

For Elevate 2014, the Goat Farm Arts Center, a “creative industrial complex” that produces vanguard arts programming, dreamt up the D_MPSTERS program. They acquired 10 large dumpsters, parked them on underused downtown streets, and curated a week-long exhibition within them.

“Dumpsters are an often-overlooked but universal feature of a city’s infrastructure,” says Mark DiNatale, director of operations for the Goat Farm. “We placed them within sight of one another across six city blocks to get people to wander and wonder; to break patterns, and to elicit new meanings.”

The Atlanta office of Second Story, part of SapientNitro, was chosen to activate one of the dumpsters based on Elevate 2014’s central theme: Social City.

The experience needed to be accessible to all visitors to Atlanta’s Fairlie-Poplar neighborhood and available for use both

Open Date October 2014 Design and Development Second Story, part of SapientNitro Photos Second Story

day and night. The team considered the festival theme and pondered the current social media landscape. Navigating it, they observed, often means spending more time with our devices than with each other. Who hasn’t wondered if the rushing stream of ephemeral posts is leading us toward a true community of friends, or toward an island of social isolation?

“It seemed ironic to us that something designed to bring people together can actually make them more isolated,” says Pavani Yalla, associate creative director for the studio’s experience design team.

“You end up with people burying their heads in their devices, not physically communicating or collaborating with anyone. We wanted to explore that.”

The team’s solution was #Trashtag, an installation that created a radical new interface for social messaging. The Second Story team filled the dumpster with more than 100 illuminated magnetic boxes inscribed with words and emoji, and beckoned the public into this super-scaled version of a refrigerator poetry game with the phrase “LET’S TALK.” Sited in a busy lunchtime area where college students, business people, workers, and local residents cross paths, the installation

“A very playful and engaging public intervention that makes a poignant comment about the disposability of today’s social mediasphere.”

—Jury comment

invited everyone to participate and create messages of their own on the walls of the container. Strangers laughed together as they discovered accidental phrases in the piles of discarded words, and disrupted each other’s work as they playfully fought over coveted words, terms, and symbols. Social media became something new—a collective act undertaken together in physical space.

“For us, it was amazing experience—and a huge lesson as designers—to watch people engage with each other,” says Yalla. “There were a lot of unexpected interactions, from total strangers messing with each others’ phrases to parents and children and even couples who would flirt with each other as they composed phrases together.”

But the dumpster did more than just collect these messages—it amplified them. Participants could compose their message on a special “tweet track” that used sensors and custom software to recognize the words and symbols on the boxes. When visitors placed the boxes into six slots on the wooden frame, then hit an oversized tweet button, their phrases were broadcast through a dedicated Twitter feed (@TrashtagATL).

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The installation was like a super-scaled refrigerator poetry game, but invited collective engagement and social play.

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Just as the container’s interior served as an interactive canvas, its “persona” acted as a mouthpiece for the conversations taking place within its walls.

In the end, the #Trashtag dumpster tweeted more than 200 messages. The posts were surprising and inspiring, at times hopeful, critical, funny, and profound—a perfect reflection of the diversity of participants.

The public also littered the social media landscape with tagged Instagram photos, Facebook posts, retweets, and direct messages of their own. This digital chatter amplified the creative acts that took place in real time and space within the dumpster, enhancing awareness of the Goat Farm’s exhibition and #Trashtag’s part in it.

The D_MPSTERS installation at large brought unprecedented attention to the Goat Farm. The City of Atlanta estimated that more than 14,000 people experienced the exhibition during its run, a number vastly exceeding the organization’s annual visitorship, and the program received more unique media hits than any event in the Goat Farm’s history.

At the end of the day, the experience was just as powerful for the Second Story team, which dedicated many nights and weekends to the project. “It was not only fun to create this communal experience, but a lot of learning was tucked away for our future projects,” notes Yalla.

“We’re working on cultural and commercial projects all the time, often using technology to try to engage users with a product or a brand. You can do all the market segmentation in the world, but when you watch people really get engaged with one another, you see that there are some very innate qualities that make human beings tick. One of them is that we like to play—together.”

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HONOR AWARD Eldheimar Volcano Museum Interactive Exhibits Eldheimar Volcano Museum Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland

Exploring Eldheimar At a museum dedicated to the wrath of a volcano, interactive experiences help visitors explore the site and make peace with the worst natural disaster in Iceland’s history.

By Leslie Wolke

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Project Area ~400m2 Open Date May 2014 Budget 30 million Icelandic Kronars (~$220,000) Design Gagarin Design Team Hringur Hafsteinsson (creative director); Kristín Eva Ólafsdóttir (art director); Kristín Eva Ólafsdóttir, Michael Tran, Magnús Elvar Jónsson, Jónmundur Gíslason (designers); Magnús Elvar Jónsson,

Michael Tran, Jónmundur Gíslason (illustrators); Heimir Hlöðversson (content development); Samúel Jónasson, Pétur Valgarð Guðbergsson, Halldór Axelsson, Jonas Braier (developers); Nils Wiberg (interaction design); Ásta Olga Magnúsdóttir (project manager) Collaborators Axel Hallkell Jóhannesson (exhibition design), Zedrus Ehf (fabrication of exhibit stands) Photos Magnús Elvar Jónsson

When visitors pick up shovels and dig into a sandbox filled with black, cinder-like ash, images begin to emerge on the sand’s surface, changing and sharpening as they shovel deeper.

I

n the early morning of January 23, 1973, the Eldfell volcano on the tiny Icelandic island of Heimaey erupted without warning, slashing a mile-long fissure above the fishing village and spewing lava nearly a mile high in explosive, fiery gusts. Only one person died that night but within six hours, nearly all of the island’s 5,300 inhabitants evacuated by boat to the mainland. Eruptions and lava flows raged on from the nascent Eldfell volcano (“Fire Mountain” in Icelandic) for five months, burying more than 400 homes and businesses in as much as 16 feet of rubble and ash.

For all Icelanders, it was a devastating shock to lose the community on the idyllic island of Heimaey (meaning “home”). Over the next 30 years, many residents returned and rebuilt while others chose not to. It wasn’t until 2006 that archeologists began to unearth buildings near the eruption site and, like a modern-day Pompeii, discovered entombed relics of everyday life: a table set for breakfast, folded clothes waiting to be put away.

In May 2014, the Eldheimar (“Worlds of Fire”) Volcano Museum opened its doors on the slopes of that same volcanic fissure. A series of interactive experiences created by interactive media design firm Gagarin invite visitors to explore the remains of the village and help bring a sense of closure to the painful event.

a way to virtually visit the rooms from outside the cottage.

Gagarin, a 12-person interactive media design firm based in Reykjavík, joined the project near the end of the exhibit design process, with only 12 months until opening. Their mission was to create the “interface” for the cottage, and to design several other hands-on exhibits.

A Microsoft Kinect system above the sandbox measures the changing distance between the sand and the Kinect and projects different layers of HD video according to the depth of the sand.

Her home or our museum?

The Eldheimer museum is built upon precarious and overlapping definitions of the personal and the historical. Nils Wiberg, an interaction designer at Gagarin, recalls that transforming Mrs. Sigurðardóttir’s home into a museum was controversial.

“This was not like Pompeii in the sense that everyone was related to the people who lived there—and yet people’s houses and people’s memories were excavated as if they were ancient history.” Mrs. Sigurðardóttir herself spoke at the opening ceremony and brought more of her belongings to the museum. Gagarin project manager Ásta Olga Magnúsdóttir asks, “Are these things hers or the museum’s? It’s a gray area because she still felt it was her house. How or when does that change?”

The Gagarin team envisioned museum visitors as “protagonist explorers” rather than “Home” again passive viewers, and designed each activity to The centerpiece of the museum is the home of Mrs. promote investigation and participation. In front Gerður Sigurðardóttir and her family, a small cottage of the cottage, three podiums, each topped with nearly consumed by fire and lava but preserved by an inclined video screen and a joystick, invite the ash that engulfed it. visitors to inspect the interior of the home by Archaeologists carefully removed the ash and piloting remote video cameras. The rooms and debris, gingerly repositioning household items their contents are ash-gray and motionless, yet where they were found, and a gallery was built the common objects they contain—hair curlers, around the house. Because the unstable structure plates, cups—convey the vitality of their former was too dangerous to enter, exhibit designer Axel inhabitants, and our contemporary kinship Hallkell Jóhannesson sought a partner to design with them.

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“A sophisticated overall design language that allows the traumatic subject matter to speak for itself. At the same time, interactive media are used in a playful manner that engages the audience to explore the historic events and relate to them on a personal level. Excavation is an impressive example for merging digital content with a surprising physical interface.”—Jury comment

Shared experiences To provide context for the eruption and its aftermath, the Gagarin team developed a large interactive table called “The Wheel of Time,” encircled by a hip-high metal steering wheel. A map of Heimaey is projected on the tabletop from above.

Turns of the wheel transport visitors through a kind of time-lapsed version of the volcanic eruption: the date on the timeline border ticks forward day by day as the map transforms to show the growing fissures, shifting landmasses, and tides of lava, along with illustrative photos.

Wiberg explained that moving a wheel or a dial is a common gesture, “but the tangibility of the wheel transforms the movement into a performance, a full-body interaction. The weight of a physical artifact and the communal shape of a table create the potential for a shared interactive experience.” Since the museum opened, Wiberg and the design team have observed visitors at the table “collaborating with people they don’t know, taking turns driving the linear story, and moving at a pace that suits everybody. It inspires us to design future installations as multi-user, but with one input mechanism—like the wheel—to create a group experience.”

Excavation and the hat It is difficult to grasp how dramatically the eruption transfigured the island. The volcano grew to 700 feet high, lava swelled the size of the island by 20%, and 200 million tons of ash enshrouded one-fifth of the island. The Gagarin team wanted to find a palpable way to express the arduous hours, days, and years spent excavating the town.

One sunny afternoon on a balcony at the Gagarin studio, Wiberg gathered six members of the Eldheimer project team to participate in a brainstorming technique known as “the hat.” Each attendee is given a different colored hat and, Wiberg explains, “each hat represents a point of view, and the rule is that you can only voice ideas from that

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perspective. It forces us to restrict our thinking to a certain direction, to remove us from our own experience.” Ásta Magnúsdóttir, donning the hat of a Heimaey resident who lost her home, was overcome by empathy: “Icelandic people are very romantic about their history and we all know people who were there or who experienced it.” So the team knew it must help create a journey that would evolve from the catastrophe of loss to the relentless work of reestablishing the community.

To evince the mountains of ash and the herculean task of excavation, the team leveraged a familiar play environment: the sandbox. When a visitor picks up a shovel and starts digging in a pool table-sized container of black sand, images begin to emerge on the sand’s surface, changing and sharpening as the visitor shovels deeper. A map of a neighborhood dissolves into a diagram of an individual house, ultimately revealing a photo of that house. Above, a Microsoft Kinect set-up measures the changing distance between the sand and the Kinect and projects different layers of HD video according to the depth of the sand.

The sandbox reenacts the unearthing of the town in an accessible, even playful manner, but realizing the design was difficult. “Finding the right sand stumped the band,” Wiberg recalls. “We wanted to use volcano ash but it dusted up the entire studio in its fine-grained terribleness.” And it lost its charcoal color, turning grayish-brown in natural light.

After much experimentation with sands, along with trial and error in setting the scale and detail of the projections, Wiberg is quite happy with the result. The sandbox, he says, is a great way to visualize geographical information. “We were concerned how efficient these fun elements would be in telling stories. Were these tangible and physical interactions a bit too childish? Well, it turns out that digging in a sandbox is fun for everybody.”

Leslie Wolke (lesliewolke.com) is a wayfinding technology consultant and writer based in Austin and New York City.

In front of the cottage consumed by the volcano (but preserved in the ash that covered it), visitors can explore the interior by piloting remote video cameras.

When visitors turn the “Wheel of Time,� they can scroll backward and forward through time to see the events leading up to the eruption.

Turning the wheel is a simple gesture, but when multiple visitors gather around the table, impromptu collaborations result in shared experiences.

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HONOR AWARD Haymarket Pedestrian Bridge City of Lincoln, PC Sports Lincoln, Neb.

Selfie Bridge Dimensional Innovations helps Lincoln, Nebraska, smile big for the camera with high-impact graphics on its new downtown pedestrian bridge.

By Pat Matson

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Project Area ~12,400 sq. ft.

Open Date December 2014 Budget $2.8 million ($7.9 million for bridge construction) Design and Construction Dimensional Innovations Design Team Tucker Trotter (chief creative officer); Justin Wood (principal in charge); Fletcher Hamel (designer); Jared Nelson, Chris Clay (lead engineers); Ed Coon (project manager); Jonathan

Wright (project engineer); Tim Britton (production lead, primary); Sanong Pattaysong (production lead, secondary); Greg Schleich (lead installer) Collaborators Frank Paxton Lumber (ipe wood); Metals USA (aluminum), Brown & Strauss Steel (steel), Midwest Sign Supply (LED lighting), Wasser Corporation (paint), Bob D. Campbell Engineers (lighting study) Photos Tim Kail, RockBox; Alex Grigsby, Dimensional Innovations

Lincoln’s new Haymarket Pedestrian Bridge makes a bold statement as it connects the up-andcoming Haymarket District with the city’s new Pinnacle Bank Arena. The giant letters can be seen from Google Earth.

The city built a simple, long-span, post-tensioned concrete bridge that could serve as a canvas for celebrating Lincoln.

Dimensional Innovations designed and built the portals and graphics for the bridge.

T

hink of Lincoln, Nebraska, and you may first think of the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers basketball or football teams. If you’ve actually been there, you may recall the city’s extensive park system, its cold windy winters, or the local carb-tastic delicacy known as a runza.

Mayor Chris Beutler wants you to have a different, sharper image of his city and state. And he saw a new pedestrian bridge connecting Lincoln’s downtown Pinnacle Bank Arena with the up-andcoming West Haymarket neighborhood as the chance to make it so.

“West Haymarket has become a showpiece and Lincoln’s face to the nation,” says Beutler. “I was also cognizant of the fact that when television networks are covering games at the [Memorial] stadium, this area is often in the picture. I wanted the bridge to not only be a big welcome sign, but also to reflect who we are and what our values are.”

Dimensional Innovations (Kansas City) entered the project through its relationship with project manager PC Sports, its client and partner on stadia and arena projects since 2001. DI was engaged by PC Sports early on in the project to work directly with Mayor Beutler and his staff.

“From the team’s perspective, there were two ways to make the bridge iconic,“ says Tucker Trotter, DI’s president and CEO. “The first was to focus on the structure itself, but that would have very costly.

The second, more cost-effective approach was to build a simple structure and endow it with design elements that would give it the look the mayor was trying to achieve.”

Ultimately, the city built a simple, long-span, post-tensioned concrete bridge that was costeffective and could be the canvas for a unique way to celebrate Lincoln. DI’s job was to create impact and graphically translate Beutler’s desire to make a grand statement.

They started by listening. “We took a step back and talked with the mayor about what he wanted, and focused the conversation on ‘What are bridges for?’ recalls Trotter. “In the simplest terms, they’re for connecting things. So we showed the mayor a spark deck with lots of images of things that connect in nature. It opened up the conversation for us.”

After the initial brainstorming, the DI team went away to develop concepts. They returned with rendering boards and 3D models, making sure to include a couple of “abstracted art” alternatives the mayor wanted. But they had a third option up their sleeves. Inspired by Puerto Rico’s Letras de Ponce—the 20-foot-high red sculptural letters that announce the city’s name from the main highway— the DI designers chose to make a bold and simple statement.

“What could say it better than to proclaim, ‘We are Lincoln’ in huge letters?” enthuses Mayor Beutler. But the DI team upped the ante even further—showing the mayor how the 18-foot-tall letters on the sides of the bridge and 20-foot-long dimensional steel letters atop the bridge would be seen from Google Earth.

“That did it for me,” says Beutler. “It was not only a huge welcome sign, but something that would say, ‘You’ve arrived in a forward-thinking city.’”

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“Transforms a mundane pedestrian bridge into an actual landmark that effectively communicates on various scales, from the aerial view to the pedestrian level.”—Jury comment

Inside the portals, each letter corresponds to a value or principle important to Lincoln and Nebraskans, and is accompanied by a quote from famous residents.

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Lighting was a key issue.

Safety lighting makes the bridge welcoming, while the letters are backlit by more than 6,000 LEDs. DI also designed custom seating.

Beutler also wanted to imbue the bridge with stories of Lincoln and native Nebraskans, and to create a unique experience for people walking across it. “It was important to all of us that it have meaning behind it,” says Trotter.

So each of the seven super-scaled letter portals—which together comprise 43 tons of steel and use 6,000 LEDs—corresponds to a Nebraskan value or principle (“L” for loyalty, “I” for integrity, etc.) that is celebrated on CNC-engraved aluminum panels on the inside of the bridge. Supporting quotes from a diverse range of Nebraskans—famous, historic, or living—celebrate the city’s rich cultural history.

The bridge also incorporates safety lighting in addition to the atmospheric lighting, and features custom-designed, built-in benches made of ipe (eepay), a dense and durable South American hardwood.

Due to the proximity of the railroad tracks below, safety fencing and cabling were required for the entire span.

It was the railroad tracks that created perhaps the greatest challenge to the DI team. “We found out that over railroad tracks is the hardest place on earth to work,” Trotter notes. “You can’t work in close proximity to railroad tracks without having your own insurance plan and all kinds of special permissions, and you have to work around the train schedule; they don’t stop for you.”

Most difficult of all, perhaps, are strict regulations about constructing anything that would distract train operators. Due to this restriction, only one side of the bridge is illuminated.

Working with bridge engineers, DI designed a steel framework that supports the letters but didn’t add a prohibitive additional weight to the bridge itself. The letters on top are fabricated from aluminum and are 18 inches deep, while the smaller letters on the sides are formed into the portals and backlit. The portals themselves range in height from 18 to 26 feet tall, peaking in the middle to suggest the lines of a suspension bridge.

Lighting was complex, so DI built a full-scale MDF model in its Kansas City shop to test intensity levels and legibility. The letters are illuminated by LEDs and a light rail casts a warm glow across the walking surface. Trotter says the mock-ups were crucial to the project’s success. “When it comes to lighting, all you can do is build the actual thing and try to reproduce the environment as best as you can. We learned a lot from building the full-scale mock-up.”

The bridge feels like a welcoming and contemporary addition to Lincoln, and Mayor Beutler is happy with how it represents his city. For DI, the letters are big and bold and inspiring, but also manage to fit in with their surroundings. “That was the goal for us,” says Trotter. “In the end, it feels connected….and that was the whole point.”

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At the University of Michigan’s famed football program, nobody is bigger than the team.

A $9 million renovation of Schembechler Hall, the Wolverines’ football operations building, required a coordinated effort involving the best partners in design, fabrication and installation.

Rainier was selected to manufacture and install the graphical components that created a new 7,000-square foot experience for fans and recruits celebrating the program’s unrivaled success.

We worked with the design team at Downstream to make their vision a reality. The two-story Win Wall displays footballs representing more than 900 team wins—paying impressive homage to The Victors.

Success always takes a team: www.rainiersport.com

HONOR AWARD Oxford Brookes University Wayfinding Oxford Brookes University

Project Area 24,000m2 Open Date May 2014 Design Holmes Wood Design Team Alexandra Wood (project director); Lucy Holmes (creative director); Amanda Morrison (senior designer);

Shomil Shah (project manager, strategist); Eileen Tunbridge (strategist); Emma Price, Ian Moore (designers) Fabrication Rivermeade Signs Consultants Design Engine (architects) Photos Luke Hayes

Oxford, UK

At the new John Henry Brookes Building, 400-by225 mm directory-level signs step out 45 mm to indicate the floor level.

Powder-coated black aluminum tray signs with white silkscreened graphics integrate unobtrusively with the architecture.

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Best in Class Holmes Wood takes architectural cues to create a witty, modern wayfinding system for Oxford Brookes University.

By Jenny S. Reising

C

hange doesn’t come quickly at a 150-yearold school. Founded in 1865 as an art school and later merging with a technology school, England’s Oxford Brookes University finally earned university status in 1992. It may not be the Oxford, but Brookes (as it is commonly known) holds its own among its peers.

Although the university was attracting bright students, recent Parliament changes allowing universities to significantly hike tuition fees led Oxford Brookes to adapt a more customer-focused approach. In response to this new approach, plans were made to update the campus architecture and its corresponding wayfinding program.

Yannis Roussos, former director of capital projects and master planning at Brookes, directed the development of a 20-year phased campus-wide master plan. The first phase included two new buildings by architectural firm Design Engine—the Abercrombie Building, completed in 2012, and the connected John Henry Brookes Building, which opened in May 2014—and a reorientation of the campus entrance to the main road and subsequent renaming as the Headington Campus.

“The university had a very good academic record and was attracting bright students, but the buildings were old and tired and the university needed to invest in the campus before its ratings went down,” explains Roussos. “They wanted to do something really special that would draw students to the university, and the signage had to look smart, unique, and integrated.”

Based on the strength of their previous work and a successful project bid, London-based Holmes Wood was tapped to create a sustainable wayfinding program that would complement the architecture.

“Roussos would have preferred not to have any signs in the new buildings at all,” jokes Alexandra Wood, project director at Holmes Wood. “We believe less is more, but obviously there was a need for signs—we just had to carefully justify each one.”

Building foundations were already underway when Holmes Wood came on board, so the designers took cues from the architecture to inform the wayfinding program. “The first thing we did was look at the master plan for the brand and how that could form part of the information system, including a new tone of voice, and a way of communicating to visitors,” explains Wood. “As a cornerstone of the university’s new customer-focused strategy, the John Henry Brookes Building was a symbol of change and the new heartbeat of the university.”

The signage program, however, had to do double duty: convey the new attitude in the new building, yet sit comfortably in buildings awaiting a retrofit.

Abercrombie, a primarily black and white building, was built first, so Holmes Wood used it as a test bed for a simple, modern black-and-white design concept.

Prototyping was an integral part of the design process. “The university created a lab space within Abercrombie where people could view design proposals and samples and comment on them. We built mock-ups and people provided feedback,”

Pin-mounted powder-coated aluminum numbers in the university’s font Helvetica mark building levels.

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Restroom signs integrate with the architecture by taking on the background color, while pictograms wrap under the signs, adding a playful element.

“A highly sophisticated approach to a wayfinding system. Minimalistic typography lends elegance and a few masterful inventions like the notches and line extrusions provide visual uniqueness.”—Jury comment

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Pictograms and type are used on all signs, recognizing the mix of international students and first-time visitors at the building.

Wood explains. Based on that input, they tweaked and modified the signage program to suit the more colorful architectural palette at the John Henry Brookes Building, which is physically connected to the Abercrombie building and houses a reception area, cafes, library, lecture rooms, and student union.

The design team picked up on ribbons in the architecture—panels of Corten steel that pierce through the building from the outside, leading to public spaces—as a primary graphic component of the wayfinding program. Using Brookes’ brand typeface, Helvetica, Holmes Wood created crisp, elongated arrows with long stems to direct visitors through the building.

The signs are designed to blend in with the architectural color palette. Black and white signs appear on concrete walls, while signs against colored backgrounds take on the color of the wall. In keeping with the simplicity of the signage, projecting signs have no reveals and installation is discreet, with no joints visible.

Although the signage is intended to take a back seat to the architecture, it has its own playful personality.

“Part of our early brief was to give the signs some personality,” says Amanda Morrison, Holmes Wood senior designer. For example, pictograms wrap cheekily under projecting signs, floor-level indicators jut out slightly from level directories to indicate which floor you’re on, and the bottom or top ledges of stairway signs are notched up or down— like stairs—to indicate vertical movement. That notch also picks up on a notch in the university’s logo when used as a flat two-dimensional device, Wood explains.

With so many new and retrofitted buildings included in the master plan, it was important to select a material that felt permanent, wouldn’t be cost-prohibitive and, in keeping with the university’s

emphasis on sustainability, would be either recycled or recyclable. Powder-coated aluminum with silkscreened graphics fit the bill on all fronts and allowed the designers to achieve a crisp edge for the high-contrast graphics.

Holmes Wood was able to meet the university’s sustainability guidelines by minimizing the amount of information on signs, thus curtailing the need for replacement signs—including general room names rather than their function and using digital prints on the front of some signs to allow for updateability within a modular system.

The team also spent a lot of time on less obvious aspects of the signage program, such as ensuring the weight of type matched the architecture and the geometry of shoulders and shapes of people in pictograms reflected Helvetica’s curves. Sign proportions follow the building’s 1,800/900/420/225 grid.

“We put our hard hats on and went through the building to make sure the scale we chose was right and that signs aligned with architectural details,” explains Morrison. “Maybe no one will pick up on that, but it makes the signs look like they belong there.”

Although the university has put future phases of the master plan on hold—including a campus-wide signage rollout—pending additional funding, the new buildings and wayfinding program have earned accolades, and Roussos says Brookes is now the firstor second-choice university for incoming students.

“The building is always full, even on a weekend, and we’re all very proud of it,” Roussos adds.

For Holmes Wood, as long as the signs help ease concerns and get students to their classes on time, they’ve done their job. Wood adds, “The university has discovered that you don’t have to spend a fortune to demonstrate a new attitude and approach.”

Jenny Reising is a Cincinnati-based writer and editor.

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HONOR AWARD TING: Technology and Democracy Norsk Teknisk Museum Oslo

With the blare of a Nordic horn, the Ting begins.

The moderator leads the group through a series of discussions about emerging technologies and their impact on society.

Project Area 850m2 Open Date April 2014 Budget €1 million Design Ralph Appelbaum Associates, TAMSCHICK MEDIA+SPACE GmbH Design Team Ralph Appelbaum Associates Timothy Ventimiglia (design director), Karin Knott (project manager), Vanessa Offen (developer), Sharmila Sandrasegar (graphic designer)

Tamschick Media+Space GmbH Marc Tamschick (creative director); Tobias Ziegler (production/project manager); Natalie van Sasse van Ysselt, Marc Osswald (art direction) Fabrication Norsk Teknisk Museum (fabrication/installation) Consultants BLUWI Music & Sounddesign GbR (music composer, sound design), Stefan Will (sound design) Photos Manfred Vogel

Ting and the Art of Performance Exhibition At Oslo’s Museum of Technology, Ralph Appelbaum Associates creates a new kind of participatory museum experience.

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Visitors gather around the Ting table and explore artifacts from the museum’s collection by placing their wooden block on the projected surface.

H

ow would you answer this question: “Do you think it is possible to control technological development in a democracy?”

It may sound like a college essay question or the beginning of a TED Talk, but this thoughtprovoking theme is the central focus of an innovative new exhibit at the Norwegian Museum of Technology in Oslo.

TING: Technology and Democracy was planned at the confluence of two important anniversaries celebrated in 2014: the centennial of The Norwegian Museum of Science, Technology, Industry and Medicine and the 200th anniversary of the Norwegian constitution. Senior Curator Henrick Treimo recalls that he and his colleague Tone Rasch proposed an exhibit “that explores how relationships between technology, society, and democratic values might be understood historically and dealt with in daily life.”

Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the New Yorkbased exhibit design firm, was one of five studios to receive this creative brief, and Design Director Timothy Ventimiglia, who had just opened the firm’s Berlin office, decided to pursue the project with Marc Tamschick of Berlin-based Tamschick Media + Space, a firm that describes its work as “spatial media, staging architectural spaces and their contents narratively with media.”

Ventimiglia recalls that the team’s initial brainstorming sessions were rather unproductive: “How can you exhibit democracy? We couldn’t even get our teams to agree on what democracy is.” Most museum exhibits explain a tangible topic through artifacts and narratives, but exploring the impact of inventions on democracy (and vice versa) within a museum setting was an abstract, elusive, and scholarly proposition.

To quote from RAA’s project description: “This premise was both disquieting and inspiring—and led to further questions. Could a compelling exhibition be created around such a complex subject? How would visitors access and navigate the intricate histories and as yet indeterminate impacts of future technologies?”

Putting technology on trial

The breakthrough came when Ventimiglia reframed his mission: “Instead of explaining it, let’s enact democracy,” in a sense, “putting technology on trial” and prompting visitors to evaluate technological innovations and debate and vote in a democratic forum.

Tamschick recalls Ventimiglia sketching “a sputnik—a circle with lines radiating into it, gathering visitors together” to show a central space where visitors could analyze and discuss these substantial topics. Over time, the circle became a large round table, 13 feet wide in diameter, as Tamschick says, “a tool that everyone knows” and one designed to spark conversation.

From then on, the exhibit morphed into a performance piece, and the team’s mission shifted, as Timothy Ventimiglia explains “to design a stage set and the interaction between people and ideas within that space.”

From table to Ting

The curators discovered a pertinent historical precedent to the form of the table: “ting” is the name for an ancient space where tribes in northern European countries would gather to discuss alliances and settle disputes. An area in an open field was defined by a circle of stones around the perimeter and often, a table at its center. Ting also refers to the meetings that occurred there, and over centuries, these assemblies grew into the governing bodies of northern Europe. To this day, Norway’s legislature is called the Storting, or “great ting.”

Now the exhibit had a name—TING: Technology and Democracy—and a rich cultural legacy to build upon.

While the ting would be the center of the experiential exhibit, Ventimiglia and his team recognized a need for some browsable and lessstructured displays that would act as a prologue to the dialogue in the Ting.

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A 25-meter-wide, 5-meterhigh shelf displays 100 objects from the museum’s permanent collection and functions as a 180-degree projection surface.

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Low-tech interaction

When you ascend the museum’s central stairs and turn into the exhibit space, the first thing you see are mounds of plain wooden blocks on the floor in front of angled plywood panels that introduce the exhibit. Pick up a block and you’ll soon realize this unassuming cube is your key, your vote, and your voice to engage with the exhibit and with your fellow visitors.

The block had playful and practical origins. Tim Ventimilgia was inspired by watching his 4-yearold son Felix playing with blocks and arrived at this very low-tech device for conversing about leadingedge technology. The high tech/low tech dichotomy sparks questions about how we interact with tools and what makes them effective and familiar.

Wood also conveys warmth and what Ventimilgia calls “an equality of the graphics system and the architecture.” Plus, the museum has a talented team of in-house woodworkers who were able to build all the cabinetry and armatures, along with about 60,000 wooden blocks.

The exhibit begins with four objects from the museum’s collection: a television transmitter, a military rifle, an industrial robot, and an early computer. Each item is showcased on modular wooden platforms. When a visitor places their block on a niche next to the artifact, a narrative about its impact on society is revealed. In these galleries, Ventimilgia wanted to convey: “Here I am not just going to read a story that a curator has written, it’s something more open, more provocative.”

Visitors assemble in a dramatically lit amphitheater circumscribed by an 85-foot long, 16-foot-wide arched wall of shelves that encircles one side of the Ting table. One hundred artifacts— from a bullhorn to a waffle iron—each framed in their own nook, sit on the shelves. (Why a waffle

iron? Curator Henrick Treimo explains that waffles were and are a common and [literally] sweet accompaniment to Norwegian cultural gatherings, “which are important to the democracy as they create a sense of community and belonging.”) A sophisticated lighting system can either illuminate the object itself, or using what Ventimilgia calls “a very old theater trick,” video can be projected over the objects on a seamless transparent scrim, creating a 180-degree projection surface.

At the Ting

Ambient pixelated waves wash over the ting table, projected from above, attracting visitors to gather around it. They can interact with the giant curiocabinet by putting their block on a corresponding image on the table, which then initiates a descriptive animated interlude on the wall. For example, a length of railroad rail iron poised in its niche dissolves into a larger-than-life locomotive barreling right at you. Sensors above the table track the positions of the blocks and a show controller launches corresponding video clips projected on the rounded wall.

A Nordic horn sounds. A facilitator from the museum staff welcomes visitors to the Ting and introduces one of several controversial emerging technologies to the group to discuss.

To introduce the object of discussion, a short video wipes over the enormous screen. Marc Tamschick explains that the video introductions or trailers “immerse people in these themes by using this huge screen and bring them into the loop very quickly—you are inside the topic.“ Then the facilitator opens the discussion, asking the group to vote on increasingly complex issues about the given invention, sparking conversation and debate across the table. Treimo

As they exit the Ting, visitors are asked one last question: “Do you think it is possible to control technological development in a democracy?” They use their wooden blocks to vote.

recounts, “To our great satisfaction and surprise, we’ve observed that visitors of all sorts are willing to discuss, and to discuss with each other.”

Ting sessions run from 8 to 30 minutes depending on the number and age of the visitors.

Each session ends with a real-time video visualization of the current group’s votes in the context of previous sessions—a visual metaphor for a democratic world cumulatively built by individual choices.

Since TING opened in April 2014, more than 150,000 visitors have taken part in Ting sessions, including companies and agencies that have staged public debates in the forum. Tamschick sums up the exhibit’s unique achievement: “I think it’s a prototype with a lot of potential to create an atmosphere where people are not just consumers eating the food they are served, but instead they are the cooks—their own involvement becomes the value of the experience.”

“The combination of physical and digital elements gives strength to this project. The use of a basic wooden cube as a haptic interface creates an interesting contrast with the digital layer of projected visualized data.”

—Jury comment

Leslie Wolke (lesliewolke.com) is a wayfinding technology consultant and writer based in Austin and New York City. eg magazine — 49

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MERIT AWARDS

Americans Disabled for Life Memorial Cathedral of St. John the Divine Dog Signage City of Dandenong Interpretive Structures Centro Robert Garza, Universidad de Monterrey Signage and Graphics Century: 100 Years of Type in Design Cooper Hewitt Design Museum Interactives Cornell University Stocking Hall CRYPTO

Curtain of Names/Advisory Board Company Member Wall Dongdaemun Design Plaza Wayfinding Foresta Lumina Garangula Gallery Façade Get Back to What Matters Learning to See MIT Media Lab “Deploy” Event Money Shot Mt. Stirling Alpine Resort Wayfinding New Practices New York 2014 Parc du Sergent Blandan Wayfinding Randen Arashiyama Station ReFrame x FRAME Sculpture in the Age of Donatello Seattle Children’s Hospital Art and Wayfinding Skypad Interactive Wall Snap-on Museum Experience Stories About Man and Power in 10 Objects Wushang Zhongyan Cinema

MERIT AWARD American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial Disabled Veterans’ Life Memorial Foundation, Inc. Washington, D.C.

Opened in October 2014 on a two-acre site adjacent to the National Mall, the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial is the first national memorial dedicated to the 3.5 million veterans living with permanent disabilities.

The memorial consists of a star-shaped reflecting pool with eternal flame and a series of 48 imaged panels made of five layers of 3/4-inch Starphire glass, comprising three separate walls.

The dramatic glass walls capture the voices of disabled veterans, telling their stories of courage and extraordinary sacrifices made in the service of their country.

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Design Michael Vergason Landscape Architects (design and landscaping/primary), Cloud Gehshan Associates (experiential graphic design) Design Team Michael Vergason Landscape Architects: Michael Vergason (principal in charge), Doug Hayes (senior associate), Beata Corcoran (project coordinator) Cloud Gehshan Associates: Jerome Cloud (principal in

charge); Ian Goldberg (senior designer); Lily Chong, Matt Cavalier, Leslie Bowman, Sophie Xu, Steve Ricci, Kate Otte (designers) Collaborators Larry Kirkland Studios (bronze sculptures), Claude R. Engle (lighting consultant), History Associates Inc. (historic consultant), The John Stevens Shop (stone inscriptions), Fluidity Design Consultants (reflecting pool), Technifex (ceremonial flame)

The montages are brought to life by changing day and evening light illuminating the bronze silhouettes and passing through the translucent glass. The threading of veterans’ voices and images, constantly shifting and further animated by reflections and shadows of visitors, captures a sense of loss and hope, struggle and strength.

“A powerful counter to the prevailing aesthetic toward abstract symbolism for memorials. The grittiness of the soldiers’ images is heightened by the illusion that the figures actually exist in space. A deeply moving contemplative place.”—Jury comment

Fabrication Walla Walla Foundry (bronze sculptures), Savoy Studios (glass fabrication management), Hartung Glass Industries (glass panel cutting, tempering), Moon Shadow Glass (glass panel etching), Glass Strategies (glass panel lamination) Photos Craig Collins, Shalom Baranes Associates

MERIT AWARD Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine Dog Signage The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine New York

As a popular neighborhood dog-walking spot, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine wanted to gently encourage visitors to curb and leash thy dogs.

Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and team created a series of signs that use branded typography and humor to make the point.

Following the church’s brand identity (which Bierut created in 2009), the signs employ the custom font Divine, a redrawn version of Frederic Goudy’s 1928 Blackletter.

Design Pentagram Design Team Michael Bierut (partner in charge and designer), Jesse Reed (designer) Fabrication Top Notch Graphics Photos Pentagram Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

“Thou shalt not poop,” “Hold close thy loved,” and “Collect what you receive” are popular with visitors and critics alike. The signs have been a big hit in social media and they often get stolen. Pentagram takes this as a compliment.

“Smart, funny, highly memorable. It shows how you can do a lot with a small budget if you’ve got a strong idea. I also like how it takes a message that normally no one wants to see, and turns it into a feature.”—Jury comment

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Design HeineJones

MERIT AWARD

Design Team Mike Heine (creative director), Steve Jones (production director)

City of Dandenong Interpretive Structures

Photos HeineJones

City of Greater Dandenong Dandenong, Victoria, Australia

Dandenong has the most diverse multicultural immigrant population in Australia. As part of a major revitalization program, its central commercial district was redeveloped and now boasts an inspiring urban landscape with a strong design ethos. To help tell its story to visitors and residents, the city asked HeineJones to create interpretive elements that could be applied citywide, adapt visually to different local environments, and be an effective vehicle for sharing the city’s history. Importantly, the design solution also needed to respond to a local culture that embraces English as a shared language.

HeineJones’ solution is a ribbon-like form that can be expressed in various compositions in response

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to existing structures, furniture, or landscapes. It celebrates the English language through laser-cut “hero” words that “erode” one end of the structure, creating a transparent quality, reducing the visual impact, and adding visual interest. The remaining section of the structure forms a clean canvas to present detailed information.

“Excellent use of typography in a threedimensional context. Die-cut letterforms dissolve the markers in a visually engaging way. The unexpected immediacy of form and language creates an enhanced level of engagement with this environment.”—Jury comment

MERIT AWARD Centro Roberto Garza Sada, University de Monterrey Signage and Graphics Universidad de Monterrey Monterrey, Mexico

Design Pentagram Design Team Abbott Miller (partner in charge and designer); YoonYoung Chai, Chris Adamick, Kristen Spilman (designers) Photos Oscar Estrada, Jorge Taboada Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Centro Roberto Garza Sada is a new six-story arts center at the Universidad de Monterrey designed

by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando.

Rising from the mountainous landscape of northeast Mexico, the building has quickly become an iconic landmark. Pentagram’s Abbott Miller designed a comprehensive signage, wayfinding, and environmental graphics program that complements the raw physicality of Ando’s design with clean, crisp shapes and sleek, smooth surfaces.

Constructed of cast concrete, the monolithic, minimalist building bridges over a massive triangular void at its center. Miller’s signage takes a contrarian approach: pristine white lettering, glossy white discs, and glassy prisms form a counterpoint to the rough gray concrete walls. The sign family consists of discs in various scales, ranging from 6-in. diameter to five feet. Miller chose Fakt, a refined, highly functional sans-serif font designed by Thomas Thiemich, as the project typeface.

“The graphic layer over Tadeo Ando’s architecture is intelligently integrated in scale and form.”

—Jury comment

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Design Pentagram

MERIT AWARD

Design Team Abbott Miller (partner in charge, designer); Jesse Kidwell, Yoon-Young Chai, Andrew Walters, Young Sun Compton (designers)

Century: 100 Years of Type In Design Monotype

Fabrication Springworks (fabrication and A/V)

AIGA National Design Center, New York

Consultants Marcin Ignac (animation producer) Photos Bilyana Dimitrova

Created by Pentagram’s Abbott Miller and team and produced and curated by Monotype, the 2014 exhibition Century: 100 Years of Type in Design celebrated the incredible diversity of typefaces and their integral role in design.

Pentagram’s challenge was to create a compelling framework for a display of highly divergent typographic materials, drawn from different archives with very different emphases.

To establish a broad theme without focusing specifically on any one typeface or artifact, the team chose the period as a common denominator among all typefaces, and used a minimal black and white palette for clarity.

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The AIGA gallery was transformed into an immersive typographical environment, with walls and ceilings activated with a pattern of 1,058 periods drawn from 630 typefaces from the Monotype library. The exhibition identity, a “C” rendered in segments of Monotype fonts, was displayed in the gallery window and a pair of dynamic animations cycled through thousands of variations of typefaces.

“A smart design for a notoriously difficult exhibition space. Period.” —Jury comment

MERIT AWARD Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Interactives Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum New York

The new Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum invites visitors to engage with design by exploring, learning, and creating. Local Projects created the interactive media in an all-new visitor experience, focusing on a suite of interactives that use play to teach visitors about the process of design thinking and creativity.

The focus of the new experience is a digital pen that grants visitors access to the vast museum collections and inspires learning by doing.

In the Immersion Room, visitors can create their own wallpaper patterns in full scale, inspired by historic designs from the museum collection and audio narrations by top working designers.

Using touch tables equipped with 3D modeling tools,

Design Local Projects Design Team Local Projects: Jake Barton, Kristen Svorka, Paul Hoppe, Angela Chen, Sundar Raman, Philipp Rockel, Gal Sasson, Oriol Ferrer Mesia, Erika Tarte, Edna Lee, Mateo Zlatar, Kimberly Gim, Mark Van de Korput, Kristin Lovejoy, Miriam Lakes, Tyler Parker, Andreas Borg Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum: Caroline Baumann, Seb Chan, Aaron Straup Cope, Micah Walter, Katie Shelley, Sam Brenner

Fabrication Ideum (interactive touch tables and wall-mounted touch screens), D & P Inc. (AV integrators for Immersion Room), GE / Sistelnetworks / Undercurrent (pen production) Photos Local Projects Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

they can create objects ranging from lamps, tables, and chairs to hats and buildings. At home, they can download and post their creations online and in social media. When they return, they can pick up where they left off, creating a digital archive of their relationship with the museum for years to come. As the museum looks to grow its audience of young adults and kids, the new experience inspires a new generation of museumgoers.

“The collection comes alive through interactions that are serendipitous, gestural, and simple. The oversized pen brings forth the memory of child-like creativity and transforms the guest into an artist with a tool.”—Jury comment

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Design Calori & Vanden-Eynden

MERIT AWARD

Design Team David Vanden-Eynden (principal in charge, art director); Chris Calori (advisory principal); Kisuh Chung, Marissa Dessanti, Stephanie Zigomalas (designers)

Cornell University Stocking Hall Cornell University, Mitchell Giurgola Architects

Fabrication Geograph Industries

Ithaca, N.Y.

What do you do with a blank wall in a dairy plant?

You cover it in cow spots, of course. And hide a few cow faces in among the spots!

“Have some fun” was the advice Calori & Vanden-Eynden gave college administrators at Cornell University when they added a new dairy plant to an existing lab building. In addition, the world-famous Cornell Dairy Bar was moving to the new building and needed a memorable icon to

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Photos Jon Reis Photography

identify its new home. A giant sculptural milk bottle outside the building has become a favorite photo-op location and the cow spots make for a playful—and fun—dairy plant interior.

“Rorschach meets rawhide in this fun, playful, and moving use of negative space. The simple floating cow patterns are unexpectedly complex and delightful.”—Jury comment

MERIT AWARD CRYPTO

Design Mike Garzarelli Faculty advisor Bill Rees Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Drexel University Philadelphia

For his senior thesis in graphic design, Drexel University student Mike Garzarelli wanted to explore the idea of creating a digital experience that would encourage exploration of a physical environment.

The outcome of Garzarelli’s work is CRYPTO, an exhibit that explores the mysterious and intriguing field of cryptozoology through an interactive iPad experience triggered by sensors embedded in the physical space. Visitors are introduced to the topic and invited to use their devices to “discover” hidden animals. A wall map includes 15 cryptids that, when sensed by the device, are highlighted by pulsing concentric bands projected on the wall. Details about the animals are revealed on the iPad. The physical space was interpreted with multi-leveled super-graphics that create a dimensional backdrop for the pulsing concentric bands projected on the wall and the dynamic graphics revealed on the iPad. The iPad screen is visually layered on the wall exhibition. A wall counter dynamically registers the number of cryptic sightings. The app allows the viewer to continue investigating the topic even after they have left the exhibition.

“The professional look and feel of every single element of CRYPTO is remarkable, from the interface design of the iPad app to the logo, illustrations, and visual elements of the exhibition wall.”—Jury comment

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MERIT AWARD Curtain of Names: The Advisory Board Company Members Wall The Advisory Board Company Washington, D.C.

The Advisory Board Company, a global research, technology, and consulting firm serving health care and higher education, wanted to create a special welcome to its members visiting the Washington, D.C., offices.

C&G Partners designed a unique sculptural installation comprised of thousands of translucent, solid rods that bear the name of members and collectively form a gently curving, shimmering curtain. Each rod hosts a single engraved name filled in silver, and a single silver set screw holds it to one of hundreds of numbered wire strands.

The curtain, strung like a harp between a luminous ceiling and a marble floor, required structural

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Design C&G Partners Design Team Jonathan Alger (principal in charge); Leah Kasell (project manager); Daniel Fouad, Elle White (3D designers); Eliza Fitzhugh, Yoana Wiman, Claire Niederberger (graphic designers); Daniel Rodriguez (interactive designer); Zak Greene (developer); Keith Madden (IT)

engineering to allow the building to bear the weight of its combined tension.

A nearby digital surface, recessed into a circular column at the center of the radius of the curve, acts as a touch directory. The C&G team chose Benton Sans, Tobias Frère-Jones’ reinterpretation of News Gothic, as the typeface for the curtain and digital interface.

“An elegant solution that allows for an everevolving composition. The material choice and installation create a beautiful sculptural form with rhythmic edges and interior movement.” —Jury comment

Fabrication Capitol Museum Services (primary fabricator), Avitecture (primary AV integrator), PPI (AV consultant) Photos Au2026

MERIT AWARD Dongdaemun Design Plaza Wayfinding Seoul Design Foundation Seoul

Dongdaemun Design Plaza, located in the center of Seoul, is not only the epicenter of Korea’s design industry, but the largest irregular architecture in the world. Designed by Zaha Hadid and Korean firm Samoo, the neofuturistic building is easily recognizable as a single architectural form from the outside, but contains three disconnected structures inside, making navigation difficult in this windowless spiral space. It includes five major halls and contains 37 shopping malls and 35,000 shops.

It is also a venue for conventions, fashion shows, concerts, and performances.

Wayfinding for this vast space integrated a high level of digital and smart media. Created by YiEUM Partners in collaboration with Applied

Design YiEUM Partners Consortium (YiEUM Partners Inc. / eeung / LG CNS / Cheil AD) Design Team Kijun Park, Jang won Ahn (principals in charge); Jongwon Baek, Kookhyun Chong, Samchul Park, Jinbae Park, Sanghyun Lee (Seoul Design Foundation); Dongchan Seo, Daeho Kim, Yeongwoong Cheong, Yonghwan Lee, Keumsik Hwang, Kihyung Kim, Youngmin Kim, (creative directors); Seongyul Park,

Jungwon Choi, Moonsung Chea, Sungwon Choi, Sechol Oh (project managers); Changsuk Yoo, Jiyeon Jang, Jinyoung Park, Yong bae Park, Minsoo Lee, Younghoon Choi (design team) Fabrication Cheil AD (static signage), LG DNS (digital signage) Consultants Applied Wayfinding (wayfinding) Photos Wonsoek Lee, Youngchae Park

Wayfinding, the wayfinding system creates distinct pathways/routes for four major user groups: shoppers, tourists, design professionals, and leisure groups. Each color-coded system has a distinct information map that incorporates prioritized wayfinding information based on how visitors understand the architectural characteristics of the building and how the building connects with the surrounding site.

“An exquisite wayfinding system for an almost mind-bogglingly complex space. The information architecture is so intuitive that it’s easy to miss what a difficult problem these designers solved.”

—Jury comment

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MERIT AWARD Foresta Lumina Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook Coaticook, Quebec, Canada

Design Moment Factory Fabrication Moment Factory, Alco Néon, Softbox, Show Devant Consultants Patricia Ruel (scenography), Marie-Eve Pageau (lighting design), Vincent Letellier (music), Dany Beaudoin (technical direction) Photos Moment Factory

How do you transform a quiet woodland park into a fun and family-friendly nighttime destination?

Quebec’s Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook asked Moment Factory to put their park on the tourist map by creating an unforgettable visitor experience.

Inspired by the park’s natural assets and by the local legends of Coaticook, Moment Factory created Foresta Lumina, an immersive nighttime attraction that uses sound, light, and video projection to bring magic to life along a 1.2-mile walking path.

Moment Factory introduced the show’s cast of seven mythical characters via giant illuminated lasercut manuscripts. A vocabulary of mysterious runes ties together different elements of an interactive storyline that draws on universal symbols like fairies and wishing wells as well as local native legends.

Moment Factory used a range of techniques— from RGB illumination of custom prints to video mapping, theatrical LED lighting and an original soundtrack—to create a completely immersive experience. The result was a huge success, producing ten times the attendance expected.

“A transformative experience utilizing light and projection changes a natural environment, a woodland park, into a nighttime theater.”—Jury comment

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Design THERE

MERIT AWARD Garangula Gallery Facade

Design Team Jon Zhu (designer), Simon Hancock (creative director), Paul Tabouré (executive creative director) Fabrication FKM Architects, Interior Constructions

FKM Architects Canberra, Australia

Photos John Gollings Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Renowned architecture practice Fender Katsalidis Mirams (FKM Architects) approached THERE to help with placemaking for a private art gallery located on a 50,000-hectare estate near Canberra.

Drawing inspiration from the provenance of the recycled timber used on the building’s façade, THERE’s interpretive design captures the winding bends of the Pine River at dramatic scale across a series of bladed timber panels. The timber was sourced from the Hornibrook Bridge, a crossing of the Pine River that was demolished in 2011. THERE’S design pays homage to this heritage in an innovative, contemporary manner, complementing the overall architectural intent.

“The animation of the façade utilizing simple, indigenous materials turns architecture into a storytelling medium. An elegant, sophisticated solution.”

—Jury comment

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MERIT AWARD Get Back to What Matters Virginia Commonwealth University

Design Cassie Hester Advisors Roy McKelvey, Sandra Wheeler, and Rab McClure (thesis committee) Photos Cassie Hester

Richmond, Va.

Get Back to What Matters was an outcome of Cassie Hester’s thesis research for her MFA in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The installation evoked a simpler time when drawing and being creative was a source of delight.

Placed in the high-stress environment of the university’s design department during the last few weeks of the semester, the installation was a reminder to students to get back to what matters: making with your hands, interacting with others, and exercising your imagination.

Installed guerilla-style in the middle of the night, the crayon letterforms were placed without instructions. Through handling and smelling the letterforms, residents of the hallway discovered their purpose. Participants often worked collaboratively, drawing together and responding to the contributions of others. “ What matters is being able to engage your imagination and express yourself without the aid of technology. The project resonated in its overt reference to the lost notion of slowness and individuality.”—Jury comment

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Design Second Story, part of SapientNitro

MERIT AWARD

Fabrication Ghilarducci Studios, David Bertman Designs

Learning to See

Photos Second Story

Denver Botanic Gardens

Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Denver

Learning to See, the permanent exhibit in the new Science Pyramid at the Denver Botanic Gardens, introduces visitors to the beauty and complexity of the natural landscape and their interconnectedness with the environment.

Second Story, part of SapientNitro, crafted a holistic vision for the Pyramid’s interior, executing every facet of the project from exhibit design to content strategy, interactive media creation, and systems development.

The interactive installations respond to the natural environment and engage visitors’ bodies and senses in diverse and memorable ways. An

interactive topographic table made from layers of laser-etched acrylic draws eyes and hands, inviting visitors to explore Colorado’s major ecosystems. A series of tall, slim interactive totems collectively resemble an aspen glade and provide unique handson sensory experiences. Interactive tables resemble the boulders prevalent in the region, and their steel finishes will develop a beautiful patina over time.

“An intimate focus on how the senses can shape story, the delicately crafted experiences create a personal relationship to the flora of the Colorado landscape.”—Jury comment

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Design Pentagram

MERIT AWARD

Design Team Michael Bierut (partner in charge, designer), Aron Fay (designer)

MIT Media Lab “Deploy” Fall Members Event

Fabrication Advanced Imaging Inc. Collaborators MIT Media Lab NecSys Group (event “dashboard” and glass infrastructure screens), Radiant RFID (RFID tags), Sargent Production Services (event production)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Mass.

Photos Pentagram

The MIT Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research laboratory devoted to projects at the convergence of technology, multimedia, sciences, art, and design.

A Pentagram team led by Michael Bierut designed a dynamic new identity for the Lab that continues the institution’s traditions of timelessness and flexibility.

The Lab has a long history of graphic innovation, from its first identity, a malleable motif of colored bars designed by Jacqueline Casey, to Muriel Cooper’s legendary Visual Language Workshop and iconic logo for MIT Press. The new identity builds on the previous system, designed

by Richard The and Roon Kang for the Lab’s 25th anniversary in 2010.

The new solution developed by Bierut and Aron Fay uses the 7x7 grid of The’s anniversary

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logo to generate a simple “ML” monogram. Using the grid, they extended the identity to the Lab’s 23 research groups. The result is an interrelated system of glyphs that establishes a fixed identity for the Media Lab but celebrates the diversity of activity that makes it great. Helvetica, central to MIT’s communications when the Lab was new, was reinstated. The new system was unveiled in a wide range of applications at the Lab’s fall members meeting, themed “Deploy.”

“The Media Lab’s new identity system brilliantly sidesteps the failures of its celebrated predecessor, while at the same time giving it a nice nod. The Deploy event materials are a great demonstration of what all those glyphs can do.”

—Jury comment

MERIT AWARD Money Shot

Design Nastya Lobova Faculty Advisor Christina Lyons Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Fashion Institute of Technology New York

Manhattan’s Financial District is the economic hub of the nation and also one of the most popular tourist destinations in New York City. To help visitors successfully navigate through lower Manhattan and find the best photo-ops, FIT Graduate Exhibition Design student Nastya Lobova developed the concept of the Money Shot Map. The map was designed to mark all the sightseeing treasures of the Financial District, keep tourists on track, and help them find all the iconic places hidden in the city of skyscrapers.

Fashioned after a coin, the Money Shot sign is double-sided. One side is the map itself, while the flip side bears an historical photograph of the site.

“This project proposes an urban intervention that is conceptually coherent in its coin metaphor and well executed in its graphic design elements.”

—Jury comment

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CHS Field – St. Paul Saints ballpark signage architect: Snow Kreilich and Ryan Construction design: Franke & Fiorella design consultant: Visual Communications

Design HeineJones

MERIT AWARD

Design Team Mike Heine (creative director), Steve Jones (production director)

Mount Stirling Alpine Resort Wayfinding Interpretive Trail

Fabrication Banana Graphics (aluminum display panels), Origin Laser (laser etching)

Mount Buller and Mount Stirling Management Board

Photos HeineJones

Mount Stirling, Victoria, Australia

Mount Stirling Alpine Resort is a cross-country and backcountry ski resort on the slopes of Mount Stirling in the Australian Alps, about 140 miles from Melbourne.

Resort management asked HeineJones to create an interpretive solution and wayfinding for its most popular bushwalking trail. HeineJones’ goals were to help guide visitors along the trail, enhance their experience with the cultural and natural history of the region, and educate them about the fragility of the environment and how they can contribute to its care.

With a limited budget, timeframe, and limited access to the trail, a simple, cost-effective, and easy-to-install solution was required. HeineJones’

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created sturdy cypress pine posts laser-etched with the name of the resort and at eye level, partially encased in three-sided aluminum panels with digital prints applied. The interpretive panels provide simple trail wayfinding as well as walking distances between points of interest and information about animals and plants, helping to enrich walkers’ enjoyment of the trail.

“Integration into the existing vertical alpine forest is the key to the success of this design.

This execution forgoes the customary panel and achieves its purpose without heavy intervention.”

—Jury comment

Design Pentagram

MERIT AWARD New Practices New York 2014

Design Team Natasha Jen (partner in charge, designer); Jeffrey Waldman, Yenwei Liu (designers)

AIA New Practices New York Committee

Photos Pentagram

The Center for Architecture, New York

New Practices New York is a biennial AIA competition that recognizes new and innovative architecture and design firms. Pentagram’s Natasha Jen and team designed the 2014 competition graphics and exhibition, organized around the theme “Action!”

Exhibitions about architecture often rely on printed display boards mounted to the wall. Jen wanted to liberate the content from these boards.

Budget was also a big concern, so the team looked for a high-impact but inexpensive, easy-to-produce solution. They found the answer in black vinyl tape.

Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Jen’s design extends the strong black line of the New Practices Committee logo into graphics that run across the walls and floor of the gallery to activate the space. The team also developed a custom typeface based on tape lettering. Names, titles, and quotes were directly affixed to the wall with black tape, with the letters formed according to the design of the font.

“This project reminds us that great ideas don’t necessarily require large budgets.”—Jury comment

eg magazine — 71

MERIT AWARD Parc du Sergent Blandan Wayfinding Grand Lyon Lyon, France

Parc du Sergent Blandan, a former military barracks on 42 acres, was reimagined to provide a new urban oasis for the city of Lyon, France.

Nicholas Vrignaud and Analia Garcia Ramirez designed the wayfinding. Their mission was to help visitors navigate the park and bring attention to its historical buildings and fun new features such as a skate park, an imaginary fort/climbing wall, game fields, and other amenities.

Inspired by the vestiges of an old military marking system found on the site, they translated the red stenciled dots into sculptural signage. Five sizes of bold red circles accommodate various functional needs, from entrance identifiers to interpretive and directional signs.

Swiss typographer André Baldinger and associate Toan Vu-Huu consulted on the project typeface. Inspired again by the red circles, the team opted for Baldinger’s B-Dot family, a pixel font whose letterforms are drawn from dots but are not based on a grid. The highly legible typeface looks like it was rendered from a dot-matrix printer, but with the smoothness of a classically designed typeface.

“The red circle is a bold punctuation of the environment that entices the viewer but never overwhelms.

The scale change, installation, and sculptural quality of the system always feel spot on.”—Jury comment

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Design Nicolas Vrignaud & Analia Garcia Ramirez Design Team Nicolas Vrignaud (creative director, project manager), Analia Garcia Ramirez (principal in charge, art director), Sofiane Boufar (graphic designer) Fabrication Lenoir services (primary contractor), Lenoir métallerie (steel structure), Artamis (silk screen print)

Consultants Base (landscape design), Explorations Architecture (architects), On (lighting design), André Baldinger & Toan Vu-Huu (typography) Photos © Nicolas Vrignaud

MERIT AWARD Randen Arashiyama Station Keifuku Electric Railroad Co., Ltd.

Design GLAMOROUS Co., Ltd. Design Team Yasumichi Morita (principal designer), Takuma Inoue (senior designer), Jun Takeda (assistant designer), Hitoshi Takamura (drafter, local supervisor)

Kyoto, Japan

GLAMOROUS Co. Ltd. helped renovate Randen Arashiyama Station about 10 years ago using sustainable materials and lighting. It has become a popular destination station and has helped bolster the local economy. After the success of the station renovation, GLAMOROUS was asked to redesign the platform area to engage travelers even more.

Inspired by Kyoto’s unique brand of kimono cloth artistry as well as the idea of a bamboo forest, the GLAMOROUS team devised a way to use the beautiful fabric as a placemaking element.

Fabrication Heian Kensetsu Kogyo (construction), Pagong (Yuzen kimono fabric), Masataka Kurashina (dragon artwork artist), Artstock (dragon artwork fabrication), Daikan (signage) Photos © Seiryo Yamada Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

The concept is that of a “forest” of lanterns softly illuminating the platform and walkway leading to it. Instead of using bamboo, the team wrapped a collection of light poles with hand-dyed Yusen kimono cloth, creating a soft and colorful warm light.

“An innovative use of color, form, lighting, and pattern with a reference to the local bamboo forests creates an unexpected experience for a transportation hub.”—Jury comment

eg magazine — 73

MERIT AWARD ReFRAME x FRAME Allsteel, Hermann Park Conservancy Houston

Two potential clients presented two unrelated propositions. The world’s second-largest manufacturer of office cubicles asked University of Houston architecture and design faculty to consider a use for the 22 billion pounds of metal from discarded office systems that enter the waste stream. They proposed disaster relief housing.

Second, a major urban park requested an art venue to house a sound installation celebrating the park’s centennial.

Reframe x Frame combines the two concepts.

Architecture and design faculty challenged the students to design a micro pavilion constructed of steel office framing that could house an art installation.

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Design University of Houston College of Architecture and School of Art, Graphic Design Design Team Faculty: Patrick Peters, College of Architecture; Jason Logan, LOJA Architecture; Cheryl Beckett, Graphic Design, UH School of Art, Creative Director, Minor Design Design Students, College of Architecture: Brandon Berry, David Craig, Jessica Deaver,

The Reframe x Frame micro-pavilion is a dualsided covered passageway. At the south entrance, graphics introduce the work of the sound artist. The steel frame is skinned in white Coroplast, laser cut with cascading fragments to echo the quality of light that glows through the structure.

Graphics at the north entrance describe the dual nature of the pavilion, with information graphics about disaster relief housing and steel furniture waste.

“An intriguing solution to two design challenges at once: the need for placemaking and for an intelligent re-use of existing materials. The resulting pavilion represents a visually attractive overall solution.”

—Jury comment

Dijana Handanovic, Dana Moore, Andy Okonkwo, Nick Prejean, Yuan Wen Students, School of Art, Graphic Design: Seth Lapeyrouse, Linh O’Briant, Tom So, Jason Wheeler, Rhonda Wolverton Fabrication College of Architecture students Photos Dror Baldinger

Design Studio Joseph

MERIT AWARD

Design Team Wendy Evans Joseph, (principal in charge), Jade Jiambutr (project manager), Wonwoo Park (designer)

Sculpture in the Age of Donatello

Fabrication Random Exhibit Services (primary fabricator), Harlequin Floors (vinyl flooring installation)

The Museum of Biblical Art New York

Consultants Carbone Smolan Agency (graphic design), Technical Artistry (lighting) Photos Eduard Hueber / Arch Photo

One room, 23 objects. It sounds easy enough, but this show of Renaissance sculptures is one of great complexity and logistics. With renovations closing the Museo del Duomo in Florence, the masterpieces inside traveled for the first time to New York.

The exhibit’s intent is to abstract the space to an almost heavenly level, which places prominence on the sculptures. Given the small number of pieces, Studio Joseph wanted to create a promenade through the artwork, rather than revealing the whole collection at once. Fabric scrim allowed the team to create mystery and discovery.

The circulation route takes the visitor on a geographic path around the Duomo from one “porta” to the next.

“We were impressed in part by what was not done here. The designers practiced exceptional restraint in the use graphics and color, allowing the objects to shine. The scrims add a beautiful, ethereal quality to the space yet don’t compete with the art. Lovely.”

—Jury comment

eg magazine — 75

Design Studio SC

MERIT AWARD

Design Team Mark Sanders (project director); Billy Chen (design director); Cynthia Hall, Faith Berry, Cory Binau (designers)

Seattle Children’s Hospital Art and Wayfinding

Fabrication Tube Art Group (fabricator); Lab Partners (illustrator)

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Consultants ZGF Architects (project architect)

Seattle

Photos Lara Swimmer Photography

The Seattle Children’s Hospital wayfinding and graphics program eases navigation through a growing campus while offering an ongoing source of serenity and imagination.

Studio SC’s challenge was to balance signage clarity and brand warmth within a complex system that unified old and new parts of the hospital. Studio SC simplified the existing navigational structure from six to four zones, each assigned a specific name, color, and icon to reflect the geographic region served by the hospital.

The heart of the project is illustrative artwork that reinforces identification for each zone. Floor-

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to-ceiling murals appear at the entrances to zones, bringing to life the landscapes and animals found in each namesake region. Signage complements the murals, reinforces zone identification, and provides clear wayfinding information.

“Healthcare facilities are fraught with stress.

This is an excellent example of how to create an environment that is artful, playful, and comforting, while providing memorable signals for wayfinding.”

—Jury comment

MERIT AWARD Skypad™ Interactive Wall Seattle Space Needle Seattle

Design Belle & Wissell, Co. Design Team Gabe Kean (design director); Thomas Ryun (art director); Edrea Lita (senior designer); Eric Harvey (designer); Sarah Faulkner (studio producer) Edward Tang (technology lead), Scott Thiessen, Seb Chevrel, Alex Maurouard, Erik Hicks (programmers), Serge Bokach (quality assurance engineer)

Fabrication Schuchart (general contractor) Olson Kundig Architects (architectural Integration), Lockwood & Sons (prototype fabrication) Photos John Jeffcoat Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Built for the 1962 World’s Fair, the Space Needle has become a symbol for the Seattle experience, with people traveling from all over the world to catch the view from its Observation Deck.

Belle & Wissell was challenged to design an interactive platform where memories can be explored and shared, and also provide a way for visitors to leave their mark.

SkyPad™ is an interactive wall measuring 20 feet wide that integrates with the inner core of the Observation Deck. It encourages visitors to make their mark on a 3D global guestbook and to share and browse Space Needle memories.

Visitors can visualize the distance and significance of the journey they have taken to get there—via an 8-foot-tall interactive 3D globe.

Meanwhile, visitors can explore 52 years of memories through a photographic installation that allows guests to view and filter memorabilia, early tower design and construction, sunsets, etc. Guests are also encouraged to contribute their own memories by uploading photos through the Space Needle’s website.

“The best ideas are the most accessible. Technology can often alienate people, but this simple interface makes the content immediately engaging and people can even personalize their visit to let others know they shared in the same experience.”—Jury comment

eg magazine — 77

Design Kahler Slater

MERIT AWARD

Design Team Tony LaPorte (design director/manager); Jason Gamm, Ryan Tretow (designers); Amber McCracken (interior architect); Darin Frerichs (project architect)

Snap-On Museum Experience Snap-on Inc.

Photos Peter McCullough

Kenosha, Wisc.

With its 100-year anniversary approaching, iconic toolmaker Snap-on wanted to celebrate its success with the people who made it possible: its employees and its loyal customer base.

Snap-on worked with Kahler Slater to create the Snap-on Museum, a 4,350-square-foot space that doubles as a corporate museum and special-event dining room.

Kahler Slater’s challenge was devising a way to display hundreds of artifacts—from the company’s iconic socket and wrench sets to a Model-T—in a cohesive way. They achieved the goal by keeping it simple, with a minimal color palette including a black backdrop and impactful use of the company’s signature red.

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Fabrication and Materials Xibitz (exhibit fabrication), Riley Construction (general contractor), Creative Technology (primary digital/ tech integrator), Samsung (digital displays), Medex (non-glare glass, paint, graphic film, direct printing), Crestron (controls), JBL (audio)

The design team and fabricator Xibitz created a shop feel with an inset, illuminated cabinet that runs 150 feet through the length of the museum.

On the other side of the space, a custom rail allows additional storylines.

In keeping with the company’s “5 do the work of 50” selling line, the space is also multifunctional, serving as a unique dining experience for special company events. Custom mobile toolboxes display and store artifacts—and can be wheeled away so that tables can be set for a fine dining experience.

“Restraint and discipline combined with a strong color palette create an intelligent and cohesive presentation of a huge amount of content.”

—Jury comment

MERIT AWARD Stories About Man and Power in 10 Objects The Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation Riga, Latvia

Design Design Studio H2E Design Team Holgers Elers (principal/ lead designer); Ingūna Elere, Tatjana Raičiņeca, Ģirts Arājs (graphic design), Līga Ansone, Anete Šalma, Madara Jansone, Dagnija Balode, Santa Pikuma, Elīna Elere (realization) Fabrication Design Studio H2E Photos Ansis Starks, Didzis Grodzs Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Stories About Man and Power in 10 Objects reveals the relationships between people and authority, from tsarist times to the German and Soviet occupations of the country. The main storytellers are 10 authentic objects connected with specific people and stories.

A harmonica tells the story of the people and authority during Latvia’s 1905 Revolution, while a typewriter speaks of Baltic German emigrants and a pair of boots relates a story of personal courage in a collision with authority.

The stories behind the objects were the main inspiration during the design development. Design Studio H2E created 10 rooms with 10 main objects and supporting artifacts, and 10 story lines that merge to create one unitary story line.

“This took an already strong curatorial idea and delivered it in a striking way. The restraint is admirable: rather than going for a lot of super-graphics or color, the designers created an environment that gives tremendous weight to a series of small objects.”

—Jury comment

eg magazine — 79

MERIT AWARD Wushang Zhongyan Mall International Cinema Hubei Insun Cinema Film Co., Ltd. Wuhan, China

Design One Plus Partnership Limited Design Team Ajax Law Ling Kit and Virginia Lung Fabrication Zhejiang Zili Construction Group Co. Ltd. (auditorium contractor), Wuhan QinXin Construction Group Co., Ltd. (public space contractor) Photos Jonathan Leijonhufvud Additional images, credits, and jury comments at www. segd.org/awards

Inspired by mega-blockbuster disaster movies, One Plus Partnership created a one-of-a-kind immersive environment for the Wushang Zhongyan Mall International Cinema. Visualizing scenes from movies like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, they created scenes that could easily convince theatergoers they walked into a real film setting.

In the lobby, dramatic dimensional boxes explode from the architecture. Rectangular-shaped concession stands and kiosks are planted at angles, recalling meteors in space or debris in flight after an explosion. On the ceiling above concessions, a super-scaled rectangular LED box can play movies or ambient dynamic graphics. Throughout, a black-andwhite color scheme evokes a futuristic setting.

Along the corridor, the disaster-movie vibe lingers. Several three-dimensional white-coated metal pillars grow in different directions, like buildings destroyed and scattered around. The irregularly shaped pillars crisscross with each other to create a unique visual effect. Some elongate into seating.

“One part pixelated video game, two-thousand parts C4 explosives. If Stanley Kubrick were alive today, his Mindcraft maps would look like this. Bold and powerful placemaking.”—Jury comment

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ACHITECTURAL DATA PLANKS

MULTISTORY DIGITAL TOWER

STREET SIDE IDENTITY

SEE MAGNIFICENCE FROM EVERY ANGLE...

VERIZON DESTINATION STORE, CHICAGO Michigan Avenue, otherwise known as the MagniďŹ cent Mile, attracts millions of visitors each year from all over the world. Now, this high-end shopping district has a new kid on the block... The Verizon Destination Store.

GableVision recently completed this exciting project for Verizon featuring energetic digital displays, custom accent applications, a strong exterior logo brand and much more. To see details about this project, visit us at gablevision.com or gablesigns.com. And if you are heading to Chicago, be sure to stop in and check it out!

SIGNS | DIGITAL DISPLAYS | LIGHTING

1935

Ed Matthews opens first Matthews Paint store on Belmont Avenue in Chicago

1955

Ed Matthews Jr. joins Matthews Paint

1968

Moves corporate office to Wheeling, IL

1993 1995

Moves corporate office to Pleasant Prairie, WI

1985

Joins SEGD

800.323.6593 • www.matthewspaint.com •

2012

PPG buys Acquires 1-Shot, Lacryl Matthews Paint and Field Master

2009 2015

Introduces MAP-LV Ultra Low VOC. Moves to Delaware, OH