Platinum House
Company Momentum Worldwide
Introduction Date April 14, 2018
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
In 2017, American Express relaunched the Platinum Card with an experiential-led marketing campaign called Platinum House to highlight its card benefits. With perspective-changing and whimsical design tenets, Platinum House experiences are built to give Card Members, and prospective Card Members, a taste of the incredible access, experiences and service that the Platinum Card offers. Each Platinum House is designed in collaboration with members of the Platinum Collective, an advisory group of card-carrying, creative, thought-leaders across industries. Building on the success of three Platinum Houses in 2017 in Palm Springs, Aspen and Miami, American Express returned to the desert in 2018 in an even more memorable way with its second Platinum House at the Parker Palm Springs hotel. Kicking off festival season in Coachella Valley, Platinum House embraced the festival's colliding worlds of music, art, design, and fashion to create a unique space that was both inspiring and designed to accommodate complimentary programming—from the perspective-changing illusions to the immersive installation Platinum Mountain by Snarkitecture co-founder Daniel Arsham (Platinum Collective Member). Combined, these design elements gave our versatile, custom experience a dream-like, fantastical aesthetic that served three purposes: (1) unlock exclusive access to one of the hottest pre-festival havens with your Platinum Card, (2) provide guests a reprieve from the heat while in the desert, and (3) deliver an eye-catching space primed for new and unique retail experiences. We offered thoughtful, visually appealing programming from sunup to sundown curated in collaboration with Platinum Collective members and other Platinum partners. Mornings consisted of sweat sessions at the first-ever pop-up of SoulAnnex— SoulCycle’s off-the-bike fitness experience. Afternoon programming included complimentary food and drink (featuring the new Platinum Heat custom cocktail); on-trend reclined makeup applications by MILK Makeup; express Crystal Reading & Reiki Healings by House of Intuition; spring-trend-inspired Tattly tattoos curated by Saks Fifth Avenue; and live music performances by Republic Records with artists like Kiana Lede, Marc E. Bassy, Towkio, Duckwrth, Julia Michaels and Justine Skye. Platinum House this year was also ‘shoppable’—allowing guests to purchase items from the “This is Just Fantasy” capsule collection by Knowlita (founded by Platinum Collective Member Quincy Moore), MILK Makeup (founded by Platinum Collective Member Zanna Roberts Rassi), and Monday Swimwear (founded by Platinum Partner Tash Oakley).
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
We designed this space to be holistic in nature and lean into American Express’ recently launched visual identity, which has a minimalist color palette of blues, grays, and white. Using this color palette in a purposeful way allowed us to hone our point of view, complement Daniel Arsham’s minimalist design aesthetic and create an other-worldly, ethereal wonderland that transported Platinum House guests to land reachable only through their dreams. This iteration of Platinum House brought guests into a perpetual trance-like state that lived somewhere between surrealism and modernism. First Impressions: The Entrance and Wayfinding Our wayfinding and entrance to Platinum House teased what guests would see throughout the experience. This included materials like crystals and scaffolding; artistic effects like ombre; and 3-D hedges. The Connective Thread To connect the space, we had a literal ribbon tie everything together. An abstract representation of a new brand design element, our ribbon started as a branded photo opp in front Snarkitecture Mountain. Then it undulated throughout the experience—coming up through the ground, over the structures, weaving around and through scaffolding, and down back into the ground. Like a peaceful breeze, it helped relax hard edges and bring cool to the Southern California heat. We also continued the scaffolding from the entrance hedge throughout the space. Embracing the Mountain Landscape Inspired by the landscape of Palm Springs, the Platinum Mountain structure and space was created to reimagine the San Jacinto Mountains that can be seen in the distance within the Gene Autry lawn located at the iconic Parker Palm Springs. In order to connect the two lawns where Platinum House lived, utilizing mirrors, the waterfall feature appeared to be flowing over the hedge from the Platinum Mountain structure. The waterfall was created from the same white scaffolding material used throughout the space. Programming Our Mountain and Valley The Platinum Mountain invited visitors to explore and engage within the temporary landform. As visitors move around and through the all-white installation, the mountain no longer appeared to be a solid landmass. Rather, the internal steel structure and light mesh skin revealed within the unexpected and memorable shared environment. When trying to achieve a surreal aesthetic, even straightforward programming such as makeup application and needs to be rethought. Instead of having attendees sit in a standard high chair and faced with a vanity mirror, Platinum House invited guests to recline in cloud-like seating. Believe Your Eyes We had illusions that elevated the space in a natural way. Our “Transformation Tunnel” repurposed the existing Jonathan Adler tile, warping it, to create the illusion that guests were walking through a tiled and trance-like state into a Wonderland on the other side. Together, all of these design elements created a dreamy, perspective-changing aesthetic that surrounded guests with an intriguing mixture of hard and soft edges, hedge-to-hedge illusions, and a sense of wonder that made them curious to explore—and desperate to share.
Who worked on the project?
American Express: Client Experiential Agency: Momentum Worldwide PR Agency: PMK Influencer Agency: Vowel Fabrication Vendor: Acme Structural Vendor: StageTech Soft Goods Vendor (Platinum Mountain): Dazian Collaborator (Platinum Mountain): Snarkitecture Water Feature Vendor: Scenic Highlights Lighting & Sound Vendor: AVSU
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/266585201/4f62464019
PODD (Post Occupancy Data Device): Designing Better Tools for Better Buildings
Company LMN Architects
Introduction Date November 10, 2017
Project Website https://lmnarchitects.com/tech-studio/works/podd/
Why is this project worthy of an award?
The Post Occupancy Data Device (PODD) is our solution to the gap in available post occupancy evaluation tools to allow architects to understand how our buildings perform once they have been occupied. This type of information can allow us to learn from our buildings in an effort to design better spaces in the future. We spend most of our time in buildings, whether those are our offices, homes, or other built spaces we use throughout the day. As architects, we want those spaces to be comfortable and to best support our activities. In order for us to be able to design such spaces we need to understand how different design perform once they have been occupied. While buildings now how sophisticated measurement and data tracking tools integrated into their mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, the data they collect does not tell us much about how the space might feel from the perspective of the occupants. The tools we do have for this type of analysis are limited in how they allow us to engage with collecting the information we need. Many of the higher precision tools are compartmentalized to measure one factor, such as illuminance, temperature, or CO2 and require an operator for each measurement. If we wanted to use those to collect data about a space we would need to bring a number of units and require multiple days of someone’s time to build a reasonable picture of the space. Even then, the collection of the data from the units is prone to human error and is an additional time consuming process. Multi-sensor, high precision tools have to be custom-assembled into large cart-like contraptions and tend to be expensive and cumbersome to use. Both of those options have the inherent limitation of offering discrete point-in-time and point-in-space measurements, which gives an incomplete picture of how spaces shift over the course of a day, week, and month, as well as how they vary across their footprints horizontally and vertically. The smaller tools designed to operate on their own are limited in what factors they can measure and offer minimal control and flexibility for how data is collected and accessed. Even if deployed in multiples, they tend to operate as independent units, which limits their ability to transmit information in the cases in which they are capable of communicating wirelessly. The Post Occupancy Data Device (PODD) addresses the limitations we have identified in the available tools by providing a small, inexpensive, flexible solution to architects’ need to understand the performance of buildings from the occupant’s perspective. It has the potential to allow building designers to tap into an underutilized source of data and use it as a design tool that can start to inform our process and the built environment as a whole.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
In response to identifying a gap in the tools available to us to understand our buildings, we have take in upon ourselves to design a tool to address our need. The PODD is designed by architects for other building industry professional who want to develop a more nuanced understanding of how they buildings perform. Because it is designed by the end users, the PODD focuses on the factors that we feel are most important to understand about the comfort of building occupants as well as on the ways in which we want to collect and engage with the data. To answer the challenges we have set, the PODD is developed to be a small, battery powered, networked, multi-sensor device that allows us to collect more granular data on occupied buildings. In developing it we are interested in lower cost, more flexible ways of understanding comfort in buildings from the perspective of the occupants and how they experience spaces. The low cost and small size allow us to deploy a variable number of units in a space in order to create the density of data we need. The fact that they are battery powered gives us flexibility in placing them where we can capture the best information about the areas in a space where occupants actually spend their time. The units are designed to be networked together wirelessly, continually storing and uploading data from seven sensors that have been identified as most relevant for occupant comfort in buildings. Those include particle meter, CO2, and CO, combined temperature and humidity, radiant temperature, illuminance, and sound level. These types of measurements allows to understand how spaces perform based on factors that most significantly affect how people experience them. The modularity and flexibility of the design gives us the ability to choose which sensors we want to use for a particular deployment, replace existing sensors with updated ones easily without having to change the rest of the hardware, and potentially add new sensors as we identify additional data types we may need. The PODD gives greater control over the tools available to us as building designers to understand and improve the spaces we design. The project is under active development and should be thought of as early alpha quality for both the software and hardware. As part of our development process we have open-sourced all parts of the project in an effort to create a more open conversation within the design community about engaging actively with our tools and using data to inform and innovate our built environments. In open sourcing the project we also hope to promote a greater culture of research and sharing of information and resources in the building industries in the pursuit of the common goal of creating more human-centered environments.
Who worked on the project?
LMN Architects: Plamena Milusheva - project designer, project lead; Belal Abboushi - project designer, researcher; Morgan Redfield - hardware/software design, Kjell Anderson - testing and deployment advisor
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/269027660
Posthuman Habitats: Experiments in the Hyperlocal
Company foreground design agency
Introduction Date February 14, 2018
Project Website http://www.foreground-da.com/POSTHUMAN-HABITATS
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Posthuman Habitats is a speculative design project that responds to impending food and water scarcity, stresses on energy and water infrastructure, and the nomadic existence that characterizes our age of migration. As a wearable landscape system, it explores the blurred distinctions between nature-culture, human-machine, and celebrates hybrid ecologies and synthetic forms of nature that are representative of our technologically mediated experience. In particular, it comments on the complete end to romantic notions of “nature” and recognizes that even our bodies have become part of this deliberately engineered existence. These habitats are essentially cloaks of plant life that are intended to provide sustenance to the wearer, as well as flourish as expanding ecosystems that attract and integrate other animal and insect life. The “garden cloaks” are stitched from moisture-retention felt used in fabric-based green wall technology. Though this felt system has been used prolifically to create vertical gardens throughout the world, its potential for garmenting the body and feeding the world’s human and non-human populations has yet to be explored. With increased awareness about globalized food industries and their unsustainable carbon footprint, we have become focused on reconnecting the food producer and consumer to develop more self-reliant and resilient food networks. Severe drought and diminished soil quality from industrialized farming, as well as sea level rise and climate events will force us to think harder about the future of food production. The microhabitats proposed here allow the urban dweller to live off-the-grid, providing immediate access to “landscape” and sources of food. The garments promote healthful diet and lifestyle, as the gardens are fed and nourished by bodily wastes (see details below), and inspire outdoor exposure to optimize photosynthesis. Humans, while they thrive off the system output are only one small part of the process that sustains the biodiverse habitats. Because habitats that support unique forms of biodiversity are rapidly disappearing from the earth, these garments become a new “machinic ecology” to which plant and small animal species would adapt.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
The garments become a new skin that biosynthesizes the human body into the non-human systems making up the rest of the habitat. The garments integrate all trophic levels or succession of organisms within the food chain. Most primary are the photosynthesizers or plants including herbs, greens, fruits, vegetables, legumes and fungi, that require sun and water as inputs. 2nd and 3rd trophic level organisms are essential for the breakdown of organic matter to sustain a healthful humus layer that nourishes the entire system. The high level predators of the 4th and 5th trophic levels are largely composed of pollinators which are essential to the perpetual regeneration of the skin and the optimal crop output. The system takes cues from regenerative agricultural practices. The garments can be styled for individual preference and dietary needs. They can be propagated to contain different plant communities or plants that grow most healthfully together. The garments are additionally equipped with microsensors that regulate the moisture and nutrient content of the system, and prompt the wearer to go outdoors when additional sunlight is required. The recycling of wastes is essential to the perpetuation of the habitats which activate the digestive and renal systems of the body. The plants themselves convert carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen through the process of photosynthesis. Urine, (low in pathogens and 95% water) is collected (via catheter), filtered (using a process of forward osmosis developed by NASA), and used to irrigate the plants that provide the base for the system to thrive. Organic matter becomes compost as it is processed by worms and other insects and nourishes plants. Manure of the small animals that occupy the system additionally fertilizes the crops. Finally, dead organisms provide food for pollinators and contribute to the humus layer. The assemblages are not intended to be closed ecosystems but are open to external input and “disturbance,” particularly through pollinators that introduce new species into the garments and create unexpected hybrids. The garments are intended to be optimal habitats for pollinators since these creatures are essential for food production. Cross-pollination sets in motion the hybridization of bodies as well as bodies with the whole environment. The harvest of these habitats instigates new social rituals. Communal meals require collective harvests and the location of ingredients on bodies of others. The habitats are the ultimate farm-to-table (or body-to-mouth) experience. Finally, the rituals of gardening become a form of bodily grooming – the better the gardener, the healthier the body. A variety of plants were grown on the garden cloak prototypes (shown below), including: sorrel, cabbage, arugula, purple kohlrabi, broccoli rabe, radish, red leaf lettuce, frisee, green onion, kale, oak leaf lettuce, peanuts, peas, lentil, nasturtium, strawberries, mushrooms, leek, fennel, sage, rosemary, and lemon thyme. Twenty pounds of crops were harvested from each garden cloak, enough to generate a meal for 200 people, or to sustain a family of three for 3 weeks.
Who worked on the project?
Aroussiak Gabrielian + Alison Hirsch (co-founders, foreground design agency) in collaboration with Grant Calderwood (microgreens researcher), Irene Tortora (fashion designer), and the Rome Sustainable Food Project (American Academy in Rome)
View the project video:
PROGRAMMABLE DROPLETS FOR INTERACTION
Company MIT Media Lab
Introduction Date April 23, 2018
Project Website http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/programmable-droplets-for-interaction/
Why is this project worthy of an award?
We are bringing a refreshing perspective to the field of interaction design by creating "calm computer interfaces" with a natural material that surrounds us, water. To that end, we are proposing “Programmable Droplets”, a class of programmable materials enabling new interaction techniques for Human-Computer Interaction. The Programmable Droplets system allows us to program and precisely control water droplets to turn them into interactive elements. We integrated the droplets system into various everyday objects, to function as information display, to help make art, enable play and display messages. Our ultimate goal is to illustrate how droplets in our living environment through our system can become interactive and reestablish the relationship we have had with this natural and inspiring material. The Programmable Droplets system has inspired many designers, artists and magicians to envision what the future of design will look like. Encouraged by their enthusiasm, we have begun building a platform which will serve as a tool for artists and designers to create narratives and interactive installations. Working towards this goal we prototyped design scenarios and showcased it at the ACM CHI conference, the top-most conference in human-computer interaction. Our work was chosen as the best showcase for demonstration of the technology, artistic applications, aesthetics and real use cases in design. Beyond just appealing to the designer community, our approach also has inspired scientists in the field of biology and chemistry. It finds real world applications in automated mixing of various small volume liquids. In essence, the programmable droplets system manages to not only inspire people but it is something that is posed to impact multiple fields through real-world use cases.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
From walking in the rain to working in laboratory - water is ever present and thus important from human-interaction standpoint. It is also safe to directly touch and consume by humans. In the form of droplets, it is a medium that has inspired artists, designers, scientists. And, we all romanticize with it. Although water has all these characteristics, it has never been explored extensively as an interface in a way demonstrated by our work. To take advantage of the ubiquity, the beauty and most importantly the information present in this natural material, we created the Programmable Droplets system. The Programmable Droplets system utilizes the technique of Electrowetting. This technique enables a set of primitive operations, such as precisely translating, morphing, merging, and splitting multiple droplets simultaneously. By programmatically triggering these operations we demonstrate how one can interact with water droplets in various real life scenarios. As demonstrated in the submission video, our design follow two principles -- 1) we utilize the intuitive understanding to how one interacts with physical materials (here water droplets) and 2) we utilize the natural properties of water itself to provide meaningful interaction to the user. In a future-looking example scenario we show how droplets on a glass mirror displays a message from a loved one through subtle movements. Like in one of the scenes in the movie Shape of Water, where droplets of water follow Elisa's finger movements we want to create interactions with a similar sense of wonder and romanticism.
Who worked on the project?
Udayan Umapathi, Project Lead -- Concept, Engineering, Interaction Design Patrick Shin -- Engineering Ken Nakagaki -- Interaction Design Daniel Leithinger -- Interaction Design and Advisor Hiroshi Ishii -- Interaction Design and Advisor
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/263356178
Project Zanzibar
Company Microsoft Research Ltd
Introduction Date April 9, 2018
Project Website https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-zanzibar/
Why is this project worthy of an award?
We began with a simple thought – what if we could blur the divide between the physical and digital worlds? What if you could play with physical toys, cards, and blocks, and watch your actions come alive on the screen? Project Zanzibar is a flexible, portable mat that can sense and track physical objects, identify what they are, and allow you to interact through multi-touch and hover gestures. These natural ways of manipulating the world opens up a world of possibilities in terms of how people can play, learn and interact between the physical and digital world. We are a small team of designers, engineers and inventors who have worked hard to realise this dream of seamless tangible interaction in a form factor that fits with people's lives. To achieve this we have taken a design approach from the start pushing and inventing technologies to support a seamless experience. That forms a platform for other designers , makers and researchers to make their own tangible experiences on top of as well as applications for people to use.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
We see Project Zanzibar as a platform that invites people to reimagine how they interact with digital systems. For many years, researchers, designers and artists have explored ways for people to interact with digital content by manipulating physical objects. However, the technologies available to do this have not been compelling or robust enough for real-world use. Project Zanzibar consists of a rollable mat that uses novel combination of capacitive sensing and near-field communication (NFC) to track objects, their orientation and multi-touch gestures on its surface, as well as gestures performed in the air above the mat. The form-factor of the mat is intended to be highly portable – providing a sizable interaction and play surface that can be compactly rolled up for transport or storage. Because it doesn’t use cameras to track the user’s hands or objects, there are no issues with occlusion, field of view or illumination. Every object in the Project Zanzibar platform has a globally unique identifier (ID), which means data can be stored for each unique object. For example, collectible cards can gain points and XP, gaining value over time, and toys can learn their own history and tell unique stories. The creation of Project Zanzibar has involved innovations in product design, electronic engineering and computer science. The result is a platform that is practical, easy to use and enables compelling experiences in play, games and education.
Who worked on the project?
Haiyan Zhang - Team Lead Nicolas Villar - Team Lead Dan - Hardware Engineering Greg - Industrial Design, Prototyping Christian Holz - Software, Research Tim Regan - Software Development Oscar Saladin - Industrial Design
View the project video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gl6iaVXZu0
