Interview about Spot On Interactive Light Installation, winner of the A' Interactive, Experiential and Immersive Design Installations Award 2023
Empty shop windows are boring. Especially due to the Covid-19 pandemic empty shop windows became an even more urgent matter for the city of Linz. But in particular, in great locations throughout the city those, those spaces are also unused presentation areas that can be put to good use in the meantime. Therefore this unique shop window installation and the concept of "Spot On" behind it were developed. Interactive light installations turn empty windows into engaging and extraordinary art pieces, while also offering local businesses a valuable temporary stage. We. Love. Linz.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsEspecially during and since the pandemic, inner cities have quite a huge problem with empty shop windows. Stores going out of business led to those "not good looking" empty windows and rooms behind them, that are very visible but not taken care of by anybody. This leads to an overall unattractive sight and makes life even harder for the stores that are still there. We thought, we need to do something against this in our hometown Linz.
We always strive for engagement or interaction, because we believe that activating people to get in dialogue with location-based installations leads to real life experiences that make people aware of the space around them. And by enabling interaction, we have possibilities to allow people to influence those experiences individually or even leave some sort of mark for others.
Since we never knew, how long one particular shop window would be empty and therefore available for our installation, we needed to be able to move fast to another one. The dream scenario was, that we never stay long at one location, because that would have meant, that the empty shopwindow was not empty no more, because a new store was moving in. So ideally, we would always be on the move and therefore we needed to be as flexible as possible. By the way, we built more than one installation, because the concept was designed to have several installations running at the same time.
The light installation itself was meant to make the empty shop window instantly attractive as soon as we moved in. But the intention was also to draw attention of by-passers. And once we had that attention, we wanted to use it for something impactful for the overall challenge of having a tough time for businesses. Therefore, half of the shop window was always dedicated to the light installation, but the other half was basically a flexible advertising platform for all kinds of companies, that could benefit from the attention we drew. Those presented companies rotated quite frequently to give opportunity to as many businesses as possible.
We wanted to create some simple and fun interaction through the glass of the shop window. Since every window was different, we needed to develop an interface, that is independent from that. Everybody got smartphones, so we chose those devices to be our interfaces. And - for interaction - latency, or better the lack of it, is key. You interact and the reaction follows instantly. Our technical focus was to be as speedy as possible in the reaction of the light installation after an interaction trigger at every smartphone that was connected.
As written in the previous answer, the interaction and it's quality was key. On the technical side it was about stability, reliability and speed. But even more important is the UX/UI design. It had to be easy to connect and even easier to understand at first sight, what the user can do and how to do it.
For us it was great to see this kind of recognition for a project like this. It also shone a light on the city of Linz for being daring enough to try a experimental project like this. Linz is a national hub for creative technology and be "allowing" this project to happen, it once again showed that.
We wanted to create something that looks recognisable because the installation was designed to move around in the city. While my team at Responsive Spaces focussed on the digital design part and the technology, Michael Holzer, a local design hero, joined the project team to round out an overall design. Michael und the team of RS have known each other for quite a while, which is why the interdisciplinary collaboration was nothing but fun and smooth sailing.
The "bad learning" that we had to observe was, that many people do not care about their surroundings too much. We all are trained to fade out everything around us, because we often consider it as distraction. What "great learning" did we have? Those people who dared to look up, to discover Spot On and that dare to spend some moments with it, got rewarded with a surprising experience for everybody around them to see. We could observe people that got pleasantly surprise and were obviously happy about it.
Back to the pandemic part of the concept. It is immensely important for humans to not forget about the importance of real, physical spaces. Of analog experiences if you want to call it like that. I believe, by bridging the digital, personal spaces of everybody's smartphones to the analog, public spaces of shop windows in the city, we did just that.
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