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Interviews with Responsive Spaces
Designer profileDesign Legend Interview
25 April 2018
I studied "Media Technology and Design" and always considered myself as a rather technical person. After the university I spent almost 20 years working in the digital field. Starting as a pure developer I grew into new roles as the agency I worked for grew as well. The design aspect of our projects became more important to me over time. To me, I´m still not a designer at all, but consider myself quite capable in regards of interaction design and creative use of technology to create unique and fitting ways to enable people to interact with it.
I don´t consider myself a designer. I like to see myself as a storyteller who uses any kind of digital technology that´s feasable to lifts the storytelling to new heights. Technology used in a design-thinking kind of way that is focussing solely on the story or message and never just because something is technically doable is art to me.
I kind of just happened. Thinking more like a designer in different aspects of our work feels like a natural development, if I think back. As our projects evolved and got more complex and sophisticated, the role of any kind of design just grew by itself.
My team and I, we create, design and develop walkable and tangable digital installations, at the edge between digital worlds and physical places. That´s were the company´s name Responsive Spaces derives from.
I would not dare to call myself a design legend. On the one hand I´m way to young for this and on the other hand I still consider myself more a creator than a designer.
Stubbornness. Great designers don´t go for compromises. Keeping an open mind and surrounding yourself with great people helps as well.
For our digital installation this answer is easy. If they are not design well in every aspect, they fail in their purpose. The graphical design, the spatial design and especially the interaction design can´t be overstated.
Building a complete interactive and immersive exhibition area or brand land for an international brand would be for sure a dream project.
Always staying childish, curious and never thinking something can´t be done.
If my company, Responsive Spaces, establishes itself as an international recognized agency für interactive and digital installations, than I´d be very satisfied and happy. Something like an ultimate goal doesn´t really exist, because what would it mean, if someone reaches it. What would be next?
The larger part of our projects gives my team and myself satisfaction. At least we know the whole story behind those projects and those stories are all unique. Since we love what we do, the satisfaction comes by itself.
For our projects, the role of technology can´t be overstated because it´s the base for everything that we do. Sometimes it´s really a pitty, that we always strive to hide the technology as much as possible. Perfectly hidden technology would appear as pure magic and give the perfect stage for the stories and messages we want to tell.
Leonardo da Vinci.
Never. But than again, I still don´t think I am a conventional designer. I´d stick to terms like creator, technology-oriented storyteller or interaction developer.
Designer Interview
11 November 2020
For almost 20 years I´m working solely in digital media. I consider myself more a creator than a designer but aren´t all the roles blending nowadays anyway?
Responsive Spaces develops walkable and tangible digital installation. Therefore we work at the intersection of the digital and the physical world.
Everything that draws and keeps my attention.
Technology-based interactive storytelling in different scenarios for different clients
None. I really like to stay away from such boundaries as a favorite "somehing".
When my team and myself sit together in some sort of brainstorming and all of a sudden things start to flow.
Does it serve the purpose and is it helping the overall story?
Joy. For 20 years now.
If our projects stun people and still manage to make sure that our clients messages get through. We have a focus on B2B communication and truly successful projects don´t feel like business but trigger curiosity and joy.
Do I understand it?
Design is THE key. Functionality with nowadays technology should be automatic.
Responsive Spaces does all its work for other companies and it´s always a collaborative process.
Focus on the story. Never use technology just for the purpose of the technology, but use it to lift the story to new heights.
I consider myself not a pure designer, since my team and I develop walkable and tangible digital installation. Nevertheless for me, the main skill is multidisciplinary and the self-control to keep the right focus.
Looking back I have to say that every experience is important. The most important lesson I learned though is, that being courageous and being able to sometimes convince a client to be courageous too, is a challenge but offers huge potential.
BMW, Cineplexx, Delacon Biotechnik, Primetals Technologies, ZKW Group, Kraftwerk Living Technologies, ...
Responsive Spaces as a company is 4 years of age at the moment. The development and growth of Responsive Spaces, that´s what´s next for me.
The team of Responsive Spaces features 10 very different minds with different backgrounds and specialties. Everything we do is a team effort.
visit us at: www.re-spaces.com or vimeo.com/responsivespaces or contact me at mp@re-spaces.com.
Grand Interview
23 November 2024 · Sounds of Welser L'installazione Interattiva
If it is possible to use the real products of our clients, we always prefer to do so. Sometimes the creative process is a little bit longer then some other times. Here, we started with a core idea. How can we create a surprising experience around the magic, that lies "behind" the products of our client Welser Profile.
We did soon know, we wanted to create an interactive sound installation. We just needed some rounds of testing of how to accomplish it the best way. Sometimes it is really the best way, to not think too hard about possible problems but just go out there and try stuff. You never know, what might happen on the creative side while doing so
Since we believed that the interaction with the installation should always lead to a good experience, we could not build just "another piano". By rather leaning on soundscapes than very definitive sounds, we ensured that - what ever the users do - it will always sound good.
Technically, no coating would be the most stable approach to create reliable sensors for the interactivity. But since the steel organ was going to be placed on an outside location, we needed alloy coating. So we needed testing on which coating still allows the sensors to work.
The people working at Welser Profile see, feel and know about the spirit behind their products. The are aware of the brand story and its magic. We wanted to create an installation, that allows visitors at the headquarter to experience some of that magic upon the first touch.
The goal was, to stay simple and so be designed in a way, that the installation does not give away its interactivity on first sight. That's why we chose to design something that looks like any other product sculpture.
Not much to talk about here. We just got a couple of representative products of Welser and then tested the heck out of them ;-) In the beginning we were not sure, if it would work at all. We got mixed results from our first setups. But we have plenty of people in our team that love challenges and so we just did not accept the initial failures.
By simply being a fun and surprising experience. That way we could rise awareness to the fact, that there might be more to everything that Welser Profile does than one might see on first sight.
This project was just another proof for us, that if there is a creative way of attaching an industrial product to an engaging experience, happy moments are created. Marketing can be that easy at times.
Every award that is won for a daring project is a praise for everybody involved. The creative team that developed the project as well as the brave client, that allowed that team to be creative.
Grand Interview
22 November 2024 · Spot On L'installazione Luminosa Interattiva
Especially 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.
Grand Interview
22 November 2024 · DC Tower - Top of Austria L'installazione Multimediale Permanente
At the very beginning of the creative process there just was the DC Tower. It is the highest building in Austria, a business tower in the capital Vienna. The uniqueness of the tower can not be experienced upon entrance, because it is on the ground floor. Bringing the feeling of the highest building down was the easy part of the idea. But as special as the location is, the everyday visit, the moment itself should also become special. Therefore we needed to find a way to bring the time aspect into the imagery of the view from the roof. The last part was, getting the digital content responsive, because the new tower management wanted to send a strong signal to all vendors and visitors. "We care for you. We want to be and stay in dialogue with you!".
As I said, we needed to find a way to allow the installation to get responsive to people in front of it. We needed anonymous tracking in the public space of the foyer of the tower. 2D-Laser scanners were the ideal solution for that.
Time-slicing in photography is not new. Embedding a time period into one picture has been done before. By digitalizing this approach and by going Real-Time, we hope, we did something innovative. One slice of the picture, that is shown on the LED wall, is always "now". We take pictures from the roof looking down on Vienna every 5 minutes. The most recent picture, we made sure of that, is always shown and always part of the time-sliced collage.
The facade of the tower is simply iconic. We tried to pay homage to it by using it as an extra element in the way we solved the time-slicing for this installation.
We needed a weather-resistant outdoor camera that reliably takes pictures every 300 seconds. We found one, that is normally used for alpine scenarios, an outdoor weather camera for mountain areas. Once we had a camera that delivered constantly photos onto our media server, we could develop an application that utilizes this ever growing pool of photos.
The view of Vienna and the Danube from the roof of the DC Tower is spectacular on its own. We cannot take credit for that. By mixing different times of the day, mixing different days of the month and even mixing different days of the year, it just got more intriguing. And it stays interesting, even to people who pass the installation every day of the year. Simply because it never looks the same.
To us, this installation embodies the essence of makes the DC Tower the DC Tower. Nothing more, but also nothing less. Sometimes being on point, but then being satisfied with just that, is a very good choice. At least to my mind.
The big hardware part of the installation, the LED wall was already in the foyer when we got in contact with the team of the DC Tower for the first time. The stuff that we added was really minor: the weather camera and the Laser scanners.
Honestly, I would not evolve this installation to more than it is right now. We added real-time, of course digital, snow to the installation in winter time. But besides that, we did not change the installation for 5 years now. We did add another installation onto the same LED wall, but this installation does something completely different. Those two installation just switch between each other time-based.
An award recognition is always validation for everybody involved as well. In this case, it especially gave the client of ours confirmation, that going with us and allowing us to think "outside the box" was a good decision ;-)
Grand Interview
22 November 2024 · Baseball Experience - Pitch Mostra Interattiva
The details of the technical solution really came to life during the progress of the project. We did not think technology, we thought experience. The goal was, to create a very simplified, but entertaining way, to create a media installation that embodies the core elements of baseball. We then simply needed something to measure the speed and the hit-point of the soft balls on the display surfaces.
To keep it as simple as possible from a "player" point of view. Take a ball and throw it .. That's it!The harder you hit and the more accurate .. the higher the chances to get Yogi Berra deliver one of his famous quotes.
Again, same answer. By keeping it as simple as possible ;-) There is really not much more to it. While developing an installation like this, you should never forget the simplicity of the original goal that was set out in the beginning.
We just knew, we need to be able to track fast thrown balls. The slow ones were easy from the beginning of the prototyping process. The fast ones were the challenge. Luckily we could find a sensor, that runs on a high enough frequency to really "catch" the position of the hit of balls that are thrown at even rocket-speed.
We developed a unique illustrative style that allowed us to stay playful, to stay flexible for animations and to not hurt the overall image and memory of the icon that is Yogi Berra.
By being able to keep everything pretty simple, we were also able to create a very stable system. But nothing would have been possible without the really great support of the stuff of the museum. They - for years now - do really take care of the installation.
There is no other way, to our mind, to create a game that feels real, if it is not built as a real-time application. Interaction design is a very unique discipline because it happens on the intersection of so many fields of speciality: graphic design, technological possibilities and limitations, human-machine interaction aspects, game play and experience design as well as the fact to not forget, that Pitch! should make fun to use!
There was always the goal to draw a strong connection to Yogi Berra. The museum is full of his sport accomplishments. Therefore we thought it might be fun to bring in his quotes, because they were also a big part of him and supported his status as sports icon as well as a person, that is part of American popular culture. "It ain't over 'till it's over" is a quote, for example, that is simply bigger than sport.
Interactivity and engagement is key to successful installations in museums and exhibition. The people of today, more than ever before, do not just want to be told stuff, they want to be entertained.
Do not think about technical limitations or stuff that might not work too soon. Start with the core idea, the core goal of whatever you want to achieve. And then go from there ... The technologies that are available to all of us nowadays are so capable, that usually, every idea can be brought to life. And if the core idea is good, the final thing will be good as well.
Grand Interview
22 November 2024 · Steel City Il Momento Saliente Della Fiera
From the start, this project was about "explaining very complex topics around operating steel plants". Since we had to try to use digital content to explain everything, we decided to make the steel plant itself the physical part of the installation. All the products and services of our client, that help the operations in and around a steel plant, happen "under the surface". Therefore we literally placed them under the physical model.
We wanted the specialists of our client, that did all the explaining to the visitors of the exhibition to be able to fully focus on the visitors. Therefore we needed an interface, that they could literally operate without looking at it. With this rotary knob, for which we were able to create programmable and changing haptic feedback, we gave them an interface they could operate without looking at it.
Since everything was designed and developed as a real-time visualisation we were able to freely combine different topics simultaneously. This way, the Steel City always showed 4 different scenarios at the same time, optimized for the different perspective of the 4 interactive touchpoints. By doing so, everybody around the installation could always catch a glimpse of the high degree of complexity that comes with operating a steel plant. This presented the perfect foundation for our client to communicate their expertise and know-how in this field.
Our client Primetals Technologies calls themselves pioneers at heart. Being a pioneer is all about taking different view angles. The mirror does this very thing. By making it a black mirror, its reflective surface just showed the light communication from the Steel City below it, isolated this parts of the installation and this way provided a nice aesthetic view.
Honestly, this part was by far the biggest portion of this whole project. Taking in a whole lot of details, high complexity of arguments and USPs led to a big chunk of content, that wanted to be communicated. We needed to find a way to boil it down to be able to create an experience oriented installation. Judging from the feedback, we succeeded in doing that.
It is an interface that got developed by an Austrian startup for the automotive industry. We stumbled over it almost per accident during our research of haptic interfaces. We reached out to that startup and were able to get our hands on some prototypes. Even the final installation did run on those prototypical devices.
On tradeshows it is always also about the WOW-effect that you can create. You need to do so to draw necessary attention. But once you have it, you need to fulfill your grab for the users attention by following it up with a worthy experience. In the setting of a B2B tradeshow, this experience also needs to have a certain amount of professional content delivery built in.
The scale of the LED wall basically came naturally in proportion to the size of the full exhibition stand. The installation of the Steel City needed to be big enough to show its significance and it was not allow to become too big and overstate its importance.
We needed to go simple. That was the main goal. Soon we found out, that we need and want to show around 4 scenarios at the same time all the time. Therefore we needed to introduce some sort of color coding. The decisions happened step by step and in hindsight feel all logical.
It's just a great tap on the backs of everybody who was involved in this challenging project. It let's everybody of the project team know, that they did a tremendous job and that they created something worth an award like this.
