Connections Wall
Connections Wall is an interactive projection installation created by Design I/O as the entry experience to Solve For Earth, a new sustainability exhibition at The Tech Interactive. Connections Wall explores our direct impact on the environment, showing a large-scale projected landscape where visitors can tinker with allegorical sustainable systems and examine the ways they connect.
The Connections Wall scenes represent seven major categories of societal infrastructure, priorities, and technologies: Population Density, Water Management, Food Production, Energy Generation, Resiliency, Transportation, and Waste / Reuse. Each scene is assigned a physical dial that visitors can turn to manipulate the corresponding area’s approach to sustainability, setting in motion dramatic changes and chain reactions in real time.
Demo video of Population Density, Water Management, Food Production, and Energy Generation. Dials towards the bottom of the frame turn from 0 to 100 to simulate user interaction. Two music tracks are synchronized with each dial’s position, building to fourteen crossfading layers.
The music for Connections Wall is as layered and complex a system as the installation itself. To capture the vibrant and constantly developing landscape, each scene is assigned two tracks that crossfade according to its dial position between 0 and 100. Continuously blending and adapting as visitors turn the dials, the score builds to a total of fourteen tracks that dynamically mix to evoke the atmosphere, pace, and undercurrent of each environment and its sustainable practices at work.
Demo video of Resiliency, Transportation, and Waste / Reuse.
Punctuated by constant transitions and interactive sound effects, the challenge of scoring Connections Wall was to match the intricate mechanics of the experience without adding elements that distract or become tediously repetitive over time. Over many iterations, the final soundscape was formed with a combination of melodic, rhythmic, and atmospheric sounds. These loops were designed to not overpower when played simultaneously, while maintaining distinct character in any arrangement as the dials turn and move the score between playful blends of ambient and energetic, full and minimal, or warm and cool.
Example clips of individual dials at their center position, with the scene’s two corresponding tracks playing at equal volumes.