Exploring Hybrid Exhibitions
Overview
James Turrell is a visual artist who utilizes the materiality of light to create stunning illusions and spatial environments. Turrell pioneered the Light and Space movement in the 1960s and even now, continues to impact the art world through exhibitions in prestigious museums across the world.
Goal
To design an interactive exhibition space that highlights Turrell as a artist and compels viewers to visit his permanent work at the Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory.
Self Reflection — October 23
Given three weeks to complete this project, I wanted to map out my time in relation to the various parts of the design process. I decided to break up my time into research, idea development, physical and digital prototyping, and final construction of physical and digital model.
Research
October 23 — Exhibition Visit
I along with a few classmates planned a visit to North Side Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory Museum. As I walked through the many experimental installations in the exhibition spaces, I couldn’t help but gravitate towards James Turrell’s work which really blurs the line distinguishing our visual perception and the mind’s eye. His projects highly integrate spatial environments and plays with physical attributes such as color, lighting, and size to create extremely simplistic yet engaging illusions.


October 26 — Concept Development
After visiting the museum sight and researching the rest of his work, I began gathering imagery for what I envisioned the physical space to be like. The images below really play off Turrell’s manipulation of light to create perceptual illusions. Turrell does so through simple geometric shapes that are incorporated into the exhibition environment.

A key point of emphasis for James is his ability to bring the audience into a space and convince them to stay. I believe that James does so through his excellent understanding of light and its material properties.

Littlebits — Rapid Prototyping / Rovers
For this project, I was toying around with Littlebit’s oscillator and what motion/visual patterns that when combined with other parts. The rover is controlled by a oscillator and a slide dimmer. When combined, it does a few things:
- shines an LED light
- Has a speaker with controllable frequency and amp
- Rolls forward smoothly or in oscillating spurts


Oscillation is Off
When the slide dimmer is on and the rotational oscillator is completely off, the rover moves forward in consistent spurts with an oscillating light.
Oscillation is On
When the slide dimmer is on and the rotational oscillator is on, the rover steadily moves forward with lights on and a controllable speaker barfs out noise.
Storyboarding & Ideation — October 26
Turrell is best known for his work as a light artist and the way he’s able to successfully manipulate an individual’s perception. I wanted to really emphasize that aspect of Turrell’s work by designing an exhibition space that would heavily utilize projected content.

Hybrid Spaces Reflection — October 31
In addition to increased interactions within exhibition spaces, example being teamLab, entertainment environments are becoming more hybrid as well. Movies systems and video games are becoming evermore present in virtual reality. Hybrid environments can also begin to be found in education systems and robotics. Though this is still an emerging field, it’s really fascinating to see how augmented interfaces are beginning to merge with education and more mechanical functionalities.
For me, I personally feel like the movie experience in virtual reality, is cool, but not as useful and practical as it seems. Though immersive experiences are quite important, physical virtual reality tools are not nearly as high definition a everyday smart phones and laptops. Furthermore, setting up the movie experience does take much effort and can quite easily be enjoyed through conventional means.
I think it would be really interesting to begin to see everyday actions, such as common functionalities on the smart phone, begin to take form in augmented reality.
Designer Role Reflection — Nov 3
I feel like in many ways, the role between an architecture and environments designer overlap, especially when it comes to the internal details of a space. Both individuals are designing for functionality and comfort, but I believe that architects are more focused on the technical details and logistics while environments designers are more concerned with how people experience that space. Architects build the space while designers transform an existing space to become something novel and worth dwelling in.
Spatial Positioning—Nov 5
I wanted the exhibition journey to be experienced as a narrative, with a defined intro/hook, to a climax, and finally, a conclusion. That’s why in many of my ideas played with a circular navigation experience.

Parti Map — Iteration 1

Parti Map — Iteration 2
One of the biggest problems with my first parti map’s concept was the lack of physical space for viewers to navigate. In this version of my parti map, I remapped walls so that viewers would still experience the space in a semi-linear fashion, but with a bit more freedom to retrace his or her steps.

Environments Designer’s Role — Nov 7
As someone who is personally interested in designing for spatial environments, I believe my role is to make people question the way they interact with daily things. My role is to utilize existing digital methods to transform the way people think.
Interactive Components

Interaction 1 — Sensor-based Hide/Reveal Information
This interaction really places on the theme of obscurity. That is, how can this exhibition challenge the way people view the idea of visual perception.
Text Typing — Animation #1
Depending on the individual’s position and angle to the wall text, the phrases types out or deletes.
Text Scattering — Animation #2
Depending on the proximity of the individual from the wall text, the information scatters and unscatters into a coherent phrase.
Interaction 2 — Live Positioning Visualization
This interaction has two parts: the first is the projected position marker at each individual’s feet. The second part of the interaction is the live map on a wall that visualizes the position of each individual in relation to the entire exhibition space. Both are these intended to inspire individuals to interact with Turrell’s work in ways they never thought of before.

Exhibit Space Prototyping
With all this done, I constructed a physical prototype of the exhibition space. This model shows several things such as the the interactions and informational content in the exhibition.




VR Exhibit Prototyping
Next, I began prototyping in VR to see how the experience might feel like to scale. In the video below, I prototyped my second .interaction — live position mapping.
Parti Map — Version 3


Final Physical Mockup — V2
This littleBits prototype resembles my first interaction: when the individual moves, the projected information on wall changes.
High-fidelity Prototyping — Final
Here is a more refined prototype of what the actual experience might feel like.
Final Mockups
Below are final visualizations of my exhibit space built in SketchUp. Each visualization shows a part of the exhibition experience.








Meta-cognitive Experience—Nov. 16
I think what really excites me are opportunities to visualize highly experimental experiences in convincing ways. This involves projecting 2D surfaces in 3D space or unique micro-interactions on a screen. I think quite ironically, I get the most distracted by that very thing— all the cool things you can do with with high-fidelity tools. Sometimes, I find myself so wrapped up in creating realistic details and interactions that I miss out on the actual concept itself. What makes me engaged, though, is the opportunity to receive feedback and collaborate on deeper ideas. This project has been just that.
