Sensors in the ceiling detect the visitor’s arrival, group size, speed, and proximity to the screens, and signal the images to respond-rain splashes in response to footfalls dandelion fluff floats as if on a breeze stirred by the visitor’s passing. As the visitor proceeds along the gallery, the image is revealed to consist of 25 slices stepped 40 inches apart, each slice an 8-inch-wide by 23-foot-high LED screen integrated into the corridor wall. Viewed axially from the entrance, the long wall of the lobby presents a segmented image-a black-and-white landscape, almost-abstract textures, microscopic nature, or maybe something seasonal. The solution makes a virtue of the corridor’s awkward proportions by turning it into a responsive digital gallery. Digital materials provide a layer that enables buildings to become more agile and responsive to changing needs.” What’s accelerating it, she suggests, is the contemporary pace of change, whether in response to the pandemic, the climate crisis, social inequities, economic disparities, or these factors in combination: “Architecture is stable, secure, and solid, but our world is rapidly changing. “Architects are doing digital, and experiential designers are creating places and spaces.” Jones, who trained as an architect before embarking on her career in EGD, personifies this convergence. “Silos of design are breaking down,” she says. Spanning the spectrum from information to art, EGD orchestrates such elements as typography, imagery, color, form, and, increasingly, technology to create environments that communicate, according to Cybelle Jones, CEO of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD). Imagine a Venn diagram showing the place-making arts and the communication arts as two intersecting circles: the area of overlap is the interdisciplinary practice of EGD. Architecture and experiential graphic design (EGD, or XGD) are converging in the process, digital media have become dynamic new construction materials.

In the facade of a science gallery, over 200 handmade glass bricks become miniature projection booths playing a kaleidoscopic preview of the exhibition inside. In the curtain wall of a campus biology building, patterns based on fundamental principles of nature morph from one to another as visitors create and upload designs of their own. As a visitor passes through an office-building lobby, images that are partially glimpsed in one wall-raindrops, time-lapse clouds, a school of fish-subtly respond: the rain softly falls the fish swim alongside.

Free dandelion graphic