So what do you get when you mix Global Lives staff with a room full of CCA industrial designers and non-design professionals? You get a free form, innovative, sky’s-the-limit conceptual crash course on multisensory video installation exhibit design.

Catapult Labs recently hosted a weekend workshop for students and professionals on using design tools for social change. Global Lives was honored to have been included in this event last weekend which helped raised thousands of dollars for Catapult Labs innovative programming.

In 90 minutes, we challenged these aspiring designers to conceptualize, draw, model in 3 dimensions and then explain their concept for a Global Lives Project 10 screen, 10 audio-channel immersive exhibit. The crash course was designed to get students far away from the trap of over-thinking and dragging out the design process as often occurs in open ended, artistic projects. By structuring the class in 10-minute creation intervals and then further breaking those blocks of time down into 2 minute sketching sessions the torture of having too many or too few ideas is abolished and the designer’s instincts and creative intuition take the driver’s seat and steer the design process.

The students rose gloriously to the occasion. One pair created an interactive exhibit where the viewer was able to track their viewing preferences on kiosks throughout the exhibit. The kiosks would collect and distribute that data to other viewers as suggestions and statistical comparisons creating a live Global Lives experience wherein viewers were participators in the action of sharing their day with others in their immediate proximity they might never have shared anything with.

Another group designed an exhibit space where the viewers would have the option to be seated, or lying down in a large bowl-shaped communal viewing space with the screens positioned above them to be watched from a posture one might associate with stargazing. This design forced closeness and intimacy between complete strangers without making that proximity uncomfortable. The sitting area, they explained, would also have textural and vibrational elements linked to the audio channel of the video being watched so that people with physical limitations such as deafness or blindness, could feel the exhibit instead of seeing or listening to it.

Every collaborative pair of students came up with something 100% unique and 100% original, something that is usually hard to achieve when students are so bogged down with the pressure to duly reference their predecessors in their work, or the task of creating a scalable design that satisfies the many corporate branding guidelines that limit creative mobility in this line of work. By forcing them to trust their gut, the students were able to produce inspiring work. Global Lives is looking forward to leading similar workshops in the future.