Exhibition Experience / Video Design / Poster / Interactive Cards

Interactive Exhibition Design

The James And Anne Duderstadt Center, 2024
Exhibition News Page[︎︎︎]

What reminds of you when you think abou tea? It was the first questions we asked us and the people around us. The World Wide Tea is an art exhibition designed as a conceptual response to find human connection to the tea as a personal, cultural and international commodity. In the exhibition, the work focus on interactivity, digital narrative and space design using physical objects to encompass a wide array of multimedia elements to create a shared experience among the audience.

Design Research

Tea as something shared collective across many of us, it may be a shared commodity, unique, or vague concept connected among people. We went on the street asked people around. This portion of the work helped us see the relationship, connection, memories, social rituals from people through the lens of tea. A way to evoke the different pathes of human life around a commondity. The work itself continuously evolve with collaboratively going forward.

Taking inspiration from the stories and experiences of people in the communication process and translating them into videos and visual expression. We learned to dissect the qualities and characteristics of the things we like and then use them as design elements.

Concept Developement

As we starting to imagine the message of the work itself and the possibilities of the field with design and materials. Our process moved between conceptualizing the theme around the core message about tea, to prototyping off the 3D space with, the spiral, the separated semicircle layouts. Throught out the process we continuously iterate based off our design and how people might move within these structures? Our themes and shared stories have always been strongly attracted to the concept of "unity", so much of the thinking and exploring has been centered around this concept.

Layout Surveying of the Site
We did many rounds of surveys of the site in deciding on the layout, and all of the octagonal spaces had a lot of potential but also a lot of challenges. One of the walls is fully glass to provide a more spacious viewing of the exhibition and also to be a great influence on the light source during the day when the daylight is very strong.

Exhibition Experience

Under the concept of interactive exhibitions, we considered "interaction" at various scales. For example, what kind of interaction can visitors have with the interactive part of it, and what content can it be a display of? As big as the interaction to the space of the exhibition hall, and what can be used to create the space and distinguish the interactive content from the static part. At the same time as small as what are the interactive senarios with content and technical implementation.

1. Interactive Cards
Tea cards was created to be the one of the interactive portion of the exhibition. It captures the essence of teas from around the globe, including tea types, black, green, oolong, white, and pu-erh, alongside tea accessories and cultural practices. On the front it shows the photo image, and the back offer text snippets of each item’s story, preparation, and significance in various cultures, from the tea ceremonies of Japan to the gardens of Darjeeling. These cards serve as educational tools, bridging diverse tea cultures and brewing traditions, making the vast world of tea accessible and engaging.

2. Video Storytelling

The process of producing the stories and visual content about tea both involve drawing aesthetic features that draw the eyes to our surroundings is essential for any type of creator. Looking for clues in unusual environments and mapping out what our brain captures is a valuable resource of inspiration and a guiding principle for any kind of design; if a set of aesthetic rules about shape, color and spatial composition are at work in the environments we observe, there should be a way to apply them to the designs we are working on.

3. Interactive Space