Spot On Interactive Light Installation by Responsive Spaces and Michael Holzer is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2023 Golden A' Design Award in Installation Design Competition Category.
GoldInstallation· 2023
Spot On Interactive Light Installation
by Responsive Spaces and Michael Holzer
Client: Creative Region / City of Linz
Golden A' Design Award Winner in Installation Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #144465The Design
About Spot On Interactive Light Installation
Empty shop windows are boring. Especially due to the Covid-19 pandemic empty shop windows became an even more urgent matter for the city of Linz. But in particular, in great locations throughout the city those, those spaces are also unused presentation areas that can be put to good use in the meantime. Therefore this unique shop window installation and the concept of "Spot On" behind it were developed. Interactive light installations turn empty windows into engaging and extraordinary art pieces, while also offering local businesses a valuable temporary stage. We. Love. Linz.
The Recognition
About the Golden A' Design Award
Spot On Interactive Light Installation is a Golden A' Design Award winner, an immensely prestigious recognition granted to first-rate, marvelous, and outstanding designs. Golden winners are exceedingly innovative, visionary, and glamorously dazzling creations that reflect the prodigy, wisdom, and prowess of their designers. Spot On Interactive Light Installation is expected to be a highly praised, trendsetting, and monumental invention that delivers unprecedented value. This Golden A' Design Award-winning design is a spectacular, respected project that highly benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Spot On Interactive Light Installation creates intense feelings of desire, evokes passion, encourages creativity, and fascinates us.
Where to Get It
Interactive Brand Experience Installations
We create immersive digital installations that transform spaces into engaging brand experiences. Combining creative technology with storytelling, we help brands captivate audiences at trade shows, exhibitions and live events.
Discuss Your ProjectInterviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative approach to transforming empty shop windows through Spot On Interactive Light Installation addresses urban challenges during COVID-19 - could you elaborate on how this concept evolved from initial problem identification to final implementation?
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.
The integration of smartphone interaction with LED technology in Spot On Interactive Light Installation creates a unique public engagement - what inspired your team to choose this particular combination of technologies to achieve your creative vision?
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.
How does Spot On Interactive Light Installation's flexible hardware setup, which adapts to different window measurements, reflect your studio's approach to creating scalable solutions for urban spaces?
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.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Empty shop windows are boring. But especially in good locations, they are also unused presentation areas that can be put to good use in the meantime. For example, to offer local businesses a valuable temporary stage. Best of all in the form of this interactive shop window installation. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic additional empty shop windows happened to pop up in our hometown Linz. Therefore, in the summer of 2021, the concept of 'Spot On' was born.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The whole installation has a size-flexible setup. The initial installation was 4 meters in width, 2 meters in height and 1.2 meters in depth.
- Tags
- interactive installation, light installation, mobile interface, shop window, art installation, digital installation
- Production Technology
- The whole installation consists of a easy to setup and remove wooden frame to which 24 DMX-controllable LED tubes with single RGB Pixel control are mounted.
The mobile website that lets everybody interact with the light installation has a MQTT based backend that is parked in the cloud, so every bypasser can reach it with his or her smartphone.
The light installation itself is also connected to the internet via a SIM card and mobile internet to receive commands from all users that a surfing the mobile website. - Design Challenge
- It was the goal to positively utilise ugly (because empty) shopwindows in the inner areas of Linz. We needed a flexible hardware setup to adapt to different measurements of shopwindows as well as add extra value to argue funding. Therefore we integrated the presentation of local businesses which were also hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. To engage with bypassers we offered them a mobile interface that let them easily take creative control of the light installation and display short messages.
- Research
- As a studio for interactive brand experiences we were able to apply our learnings from other projects in the B2B field to this public space installation. The overall creative process to design the setup, the light effects as well as the possibilities of interaction was done within the creative team of the project. This process benefitted from our interdisciplinary team setup and approach.
- Inspiration
- The heart of the installation was a voluminous arrangement of controllable LED lights. When viewers were 'on spot', they could design individual messages using their smartphones and send them directly to the system. A jury regularly selected new young companies and startups from among all the applicants, for whom this consequently meant to be in the spotlight in the shop windows.
WE. LOVE. LINZ. - Project Duration
- Since August 2021 in Linz
- Operation Flow
- As soon as one stands on a marked point in front of the shop window, the complex arrangement of lamps and light unravel for the viewer and an interactive ticker become legible. Via QR code and smartphone, own messages and crazy light effects can be controlled in the shop window.
- Team Members
- Creative Lead: Markus Pargfrieder
Design Lead: Michael Holzer
Projectmanager: Nazila Shamsizadeh
Development: Katharina Mayrhofer
Development: Martin Zeplichal
Development: Julian Reil
Web-Development & -Design: Andrea Maderthaner - Image Credits
- Photo Credits: Responsive Spaces
Video Credits: Eyup Kus
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