HiFi/LoFi had strong collaborative energy during the final two production days for the NYPL challenge. We’d all been eager to build more fully in our first longer challenge, and quickly sorted ourselves into varied roles. Our unusually smooth process was made possible from the goal mapping we’d done with Brett Renfer the day before.
Our exhibition design took library documents through what I almost think of as a scientific water cycle (droplet to cloud, rain to river, tap to ice cube):
We needed a way to communication the value of library documents – inspire people to explore them. We imagined a beautiful, curved installation, leading from ceiling to table like a series of streams branching together into a river. Projected images of photographs, documents, and objects would drop from above and glide to a stop on the table below, catching visitors’ eyes.
Building this installation became my personal project focus – I went up ladders in our ITP classroom and hung projectors from the ceiling to map an animation on scrolls of paper.
On the table where these images ended up, convection kept them moving in a design similar to touch tables at Cooper Hewitt – until they disappeared in a waterfall at the end.
That is, unless, visitors decided to tap and select the documents, and pull them into viewfinders or onto their mobile devices. Here, visitors would be encouraged to find related objects and documents on the table and describe the connections between them. By drawing digital lines to reinforce these relationships, visitors “voted” on objects – or rather, on the connections between them.
David Harvey of the American Museum of Natural History (yes, he was on our team!) proposed that we build a data map of the connections that viewers created between virtual documents. We would use this both to select physical objects for the exhibition – and to display them, trailing strands of media surface between objects and scrolling text and stories input by visitors.
By focusing on viewer-led connections between objects, we hoped to develop an exhibit that fore-fronting the discovery process as the Library’s main “treasure.”