When I was in theme park design, we always wanted more than the technology could do. Even with the inevitable limitations there were always designers who could overcome nearly anything to make magic. In those days, as a designer, our technical partners were like the other half of our brains. Our dialog and collaboration was everything. They were both the reality check and the inventors—sometimes telling us something was impossible, sometimes going out of the way to make it possible.
From personal experience, this was one of the most gratifying parts of making place-based experiences, and it’s hard to capture how significantly the meeting of minds—creative and technical–moves the industry forward as a whole. The things we dreamed up together for museums, theme parks, and other public spaces became part of the generally available technology. Sometimes it took decades to see those ideas go mainstream, sometimes it happened quickly.
For this issue, I went back to my roots and talked to Mikael Charpin at Moment Factory. The company is a long-time trailblazer in using design ingenuity to redefine experience and push technology. Moment Factory’s decades-long integration collaborator is Electrosonic, a company I also worked with on theme parks worldwide and where my husband lead the company as CEO through 2017.
We have long heard the idea that the integrator should be “at the table” from the beginning. It doesn’t always happen, or even often. But it does happen, by necessity, for the big interactive projects. Those projects are proof of why the integrator should always be one of the earliest collaborations while pen is still hovering over paper (and not after all the HVAC has been stubbed up right where you need the projector to be).
Charpin eloquently explained how far we’ve come in technology and also how urgent it is that real-time and interactive possibilities continue to expand. With his dual master’s in architecture and Civil Engineering he naturally gravitates to the practical intersection of art and science as do his colleagues at Moment Factory. He’s excited about what is possible and impatient for what is to come.
Moment Factory has recently formalized their relationship with Electrosonic into an initiative designed to serve transportation hubs and other public spaces. Both companies see this as a great opportunity to transform every day experiences as only designers and technologists can do. I agree. I hope relationships like this will continue to grow and define our industry for the coming years.
