Lumen: Reimagining Immersion

Most automaker sites are glorified car brochures. Car configurators don’t help you find your dream car. They let you build a digital car that may or may not exist, then send you to dealerships with fingers crossed.

The Cleveland Museum of Art challenged Local Projects to transform the art museum experience, utilizing technology without diminishing the traditional gallery design. Given this, our studio created a suite of new interactives for Gallery One, including six “Lens” interactives that allow visitors to connect with art in new ways. One features a facial recognition experience that connects visitors’ facial expressions with masterworks from the collection, while another allows visitors to search the collection by drawing different shapes. The Collection Wall is a 40-foot wide multi-touch screen that features over 3,600 artworks in curated layouts, inviting visitors to explore and create their own tours. An iPad application, ArtLens, features these tours through wayfinding, image recognition, and curated content. The main concern was how to make the technology merge with the traditional gallery environment, keeping the main emphasis on the curated artwork and space, while still prompting visitor engagement with the interactives. It was a serious challenge to find the right balance between learning, contextual understanding and fun.

Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) kills over 350,000 people every single year in the U.S. alone. It is the leading cause of death for adults over the age of 40 and also leads to the loss of nearly 23,000 youth annually. Despite being a massive public health issue, survival rates have unfortunately remained dismal at around 10% for decades. Fortunately, there’s a treatment for Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) – a life-saving shock from an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). If used quickly, an AED can be highly effective. However, the problem is that AEDs are not readily accessible, and too often don’t get to the people who need them. Avive is on a mission to change that. With each passing minute prior to treatment reducing a victim’s chance of survival by 7%, an AED’s accessibility, design, and usability make the difference between life and death. Our strategic design collaboration with Avive focused on developing a first-of-its-kind connected AED system. In addition to a standard AED’s capabilities, the Avive Connect AED™ is a portable device that, when spread across a community, acts as a mesh-network of coverage enabling support to any individual within the radius of that network. When activated, the network of AEDs and local responders are alerted to find the closest AED to the victim. Once an AED is activated, it provides diagnosis and instruction to both professional and pedestrian users supporting a victim of sudden cardiac arrest.

There are 2.7 million obese children in the USA (http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html). Children who are overweight have very few tools to help them be in control of their life.

S7 Airlines flies to over 900 destinations in partnership with oneworld. To inspire Russians to go out there and explore the wonders of our world, we launched a unique interactive project. We allowed people to fly to the place of their dreams using only the power of their imagination and turned their brains into game controllers using neurotechnology. If participants were able to steer a mind-controlled virtual plane to their dream destination, then S7 Airlines would actually fly them there.

Paper is the simplest and most beautiful way to create on the iPad. It allows you to express your ideas as sketches, diagrams, illustrations, notes or drawings and instantly share them across the web. Ideas begin on Paper.Our lives have become driven more and more by empty patterns of consumption. At a time when we face so many real challenges, we find ourselves using the most powerful technology in our history to slingshot birds and update our status.Yet we all know our most rewarding moments are those we create for ourselves. As people, we have a need to create. It's our calling to invent, discover, and do our best to leave this place a little better than when we arrived. We have an innate need for creativity.To be human is to create.

Signet is a concept that brings personal shipping into the digital age, by giving everyday users the ability to send a package or letter to a person, not a place.

Typical physical-digital and electronics prototyping require a fairly steep learning curve, meaning that hours are spent dealing with syntax. Many platforms rely on wiring and physical connections that can be fiddly and cause extra failing points within the design. SAM is designed to empower students, designers, and creatives of all ages and skills to make prototypes, connected products, and services, with zero code.

21 Balancoires (21 Swings) is an urban scale collective instrument, a game where together we achieve better things than separately. The installation consists of a series of 21 musical swings. When in motion, each swing triggers different notes. When used all together, the swings compose a musical piece in which certain melodies emerge only through cooperation. It's a game where, from the start, you need to adjust to the actions of others.The notes that are played are determined by how high a person swings. The color of the swing indicates the instrument it plays: piano, harp, guitar, vibraphone. The instruments are distributed differently within each set of three swings to create different musical configurations.When multiple swings move in synchronicity, a mini scale is played, revealing more notes and melodies. When all swings are in use, a secret musical mode is activated to give a special reward to players a synthesizer sound plays on all swings and transforms the experience.The result is a giant collective instrument that stimulates ownership of the space, bringing together people of all ages and backgrounds, and creating a place for playing and exchanging in the middle of the city center.

Of late, one of the biggest issues that India, the second most populous country of the world, is facing is of women safety. The country’s capital, New Delhi, has recently reported a high number of rape cases against women. Protests from citizens have lead to higher vigilance from the police to prevent such cases in the future.