Experience
Center
1,800 m² filled with interactive storytelling and immersive media
Client
LAMDA development
Collaboration
Yard
Phanta Vision
200+ Monks
Role
Lead Creative N&T section
Year
2022
The Ellinikon Experience Center spans over 1,800 m² and is divided into five zones, each with its own interactive stories. Together, these experiences showcase the vision behind The Ellinikon through immersive installations. Visitors explore the project’s innovative and sustainable features while reimagining what the city of the future could be for them.
My
Role
Contributed across nearly all areas of the Experience Center, but focused on the Living in the Future area as creative lead. This zone was dedicated to telling the stories of Ellinikon’s innovative and sustainable features.
The project was in constant motion: goals and messaging shifted, requiring a fast and flexible approach during the concept and design fase. Guiding the creative vision under those conditions was challenging, especially while shaping the vision for the space, the storytelling, user journey, spatial design, and most importantly the interactive installations.
Deepdive into the project
Experience
Website
Creative Concept
Interactive Design
Pitching
Production
Table of contents:
1 - Pitching
The project started with many rounds of pitching directly to the client. This was an intrinsically difficult process, as many creative visions had to align and work well together. All the different zones carried different roles, and even those roles shifted through both the pitching and the production process.
Creating a massive experiential space like this carries long and dense pitching decks. This is because every detail matters from the beginning to the end of the project. A shared vision through the space, with the different zones each carrying their specific role in the experience, had to feel balanced for the visitors. Finding a balans in where to focus on storytelling, interaction, moments of rest, moments of sensation, without mentally overburdening the visitors. It was a massive creative undertaking. But we nailed it together with the creative team and the client, landing on a well balanced, educational and entertaining experience center.
It was tricky to find the best possible tool for collecting and sharing all the data findings with the team. But I ended up with a shared Notion page where I could label all the pieces of info that we had received from the client. This was some additional work on top of the project, to get a better grip on the creative stories that we could tell.
2 - Collecting and writing the stories
My inner project manager went on a data, stories and assets collection spree. The client roughly knew what they wanted to show to the visiting audience, but wasn’t sure which of the many stories to focus on, or what data and content we could use. So they shared… (nearly) everything!
Sifting through and finding the golden bits was quite some work. This made the creative process a little tricky, as we where in a way writing our own briefs whilst working on defining the spaces and their content. The advantage however was that we had a lot of great and truly impressive data, technological or social stories to tell about Ellinikon - as there where many great innovations used throughout the project.
Using the all this collected information was a great enabler of truly creative thinking on what we could do in terms of the experiences.
3 - Living in the Future - Creative
Creative & User Flow
The red thread throughout the development of the Living the Future section was set around how the visitors would with the defined space we had created for it. Finding a balans in intensities for the different installations & figuring out what interesting stories we wanted to tell. Budget and production timelines where also becoming a larger and larger element that controlled the creative refining of the ideas that shaped the space.
As we where creating our own briefs, the feedback rounds where brutal. With quick sprints we presented refinements and sometimes completely new visions for the zone in a matter of a couple of days. This iterative proces took a couple of months before we where all happy with the creative vision that we had set out. The stories formed a great mix of technology, ecology, sustainability, environmental design and smart city design. All gre`at stories, spread across the space in an interesting and well paced order. /p>
Interactive installations
The space is defined with three different types of installations. What makes them different from each other is their level of interactivity, and with that, the attention that they need from the audience that interacts with them.
This makes diving the space a lot easier, spreading the mental load for the viewers nicely and evenly throughout the space. Together with the different categories the installations fall under, we have a nice and balance space filled with different things to see, discover and do. There are the installations:
Vertical Greenspace
For a country that doesn’t have a lot of skyscrapers, we needed to explain the advantages of building taller. Go higher - leave more space for green, while maintaining a minimum required number of housing units.
Through a Leap Motion, we track the users hand. As you move up, you build the skyscraper up higher. Whilst doing this, you’ll see on the display in front of you have much green space is freed up.
Microclimate
A very complex story needed to be told about wind & sun, and their massive impact on city like Athenes. Ellinikon has been designed from the beginning to optimize nature to benefit both cooling, a major hurdle for the city during summer.
By pushing the hot winds around the living areas in Ellinikon, whilst allowing a freeflow of cool ocean wind to blow inwards.
The sun also plays a major role, where natural shading of buildings and roads prevents any heat pockets from forming. You can control both of these effects with your hand. Move it left and right to change the time of day, and up and down to change the wind direction. On the screen you’ll see simulated sun and heat move over Ellinikon, with information explaining what’s going on.
Seamless Tech
A smart city, what does that mean? Well. Dissect this section of Ellinikon to find out. A pretty simple but powerful technical trick: The outer layer of a monitor reveals the content you are looking at, while the screen itself plays a continuous loop of the smart city in action.
