History at your Fingertips

The new Smith Campus Center at Harvard University boasts a strategic location that centralizes the campus, creating spaces that draw students and other university citizens together and providing new opportunities for developing friendships, collaborations, and peer-to-peer intellectual discourse. As part of the vision for this new center, Local Projects was engaged to create a series of digital displays called the Welcome Wall. Three touchscreens offer a variety of content that showcases cultural events and activities available to the public and students. Visitors can move various content modules across the screen to accommodate multiple visitors interacting with each display.

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Agency: Local Projects

Role: Motion Director

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My Role

Working with the extensive historic library of Harvard University, I focused on defining the interactive paradigm that could seamlessly absorb endless amounts of library data and images with containers could touch and access via multi-touch input. By first focusing on the interaction itself, we ultimately landed on a flow that felt right, and later brought the very concept of "flow" into how the data moved around the space itself; shown below.

The Space

Three large touchscreens in the lobby accommodate visitors of all sizes. Each touchscreen can support multiple users in order to better serve the heavily-trafficked entrance to Smith Campus Center. Takeover moments use editorial-style photography of life on Harvard’s diverse campus to attract users, and set the tone for the new campus center. Visitors can browse a deep archive of content, including Harvard Gazette articles, stories of famous alumni, as well as events and exhibitions happening around campus.

Out of Sight, Close to Mind

The Smith Campus Center was designed to be a safe space of social learning and formal study, so this piece was not designed to be the blockbuster experience for the building. That said, we chose to own that and focus on building functionality and serendipitous learning to the touch-wall that encouraged exploration, and exciting finds upon each new engagement.