PLUS WEEKS 

So the Plus weeks started a bit earlier for me as I volunteered to help a student from the Lifestyle design with their graduation installation. The role I was hired for was to help with spatial design concept, planning strategy and execution, projection mapping, installation building and overall final design touches. We had a small room in a office building available for building the installation so the possibilities were limited, in the end the result was an immersive installation that addresses kids in the city nature.

Here's what we started with.

For me naturally the first step was to take measurements of the place in order to be able to sketch in it and make models.

The first central question of the installation is how to make the link between nature and city with the use of materials and composition.

We thought of what are the building elements of nature and the city, then we started thinking of the visitor's journey.

Our building blocks for the installation were plants, soil, humidity, wind, light, sound and texture.

Given the place we have, we decided that we can try to project something on the wall to the left from the entrance an make it into something of a central focus point.
For this we came up with the idea to curate this wall in a way that there is the most vegetation and natural elements. As well with that we thought creating a sort of central area that can be used from the visitors (mainly kids and sometimes their parents) to sit. CENTRAL VIEW BELLOW:

We thought initially that having little space, we can think of some sort of elongation of the route through the installation. With this in mind we wanted to make the experience somehow more private and isolated, thus enhancing the focus onto the things we put inside. Sadly no photo, but we got some bamboo sticks and black nylon and built a space that looks like the sketch above. My idea with this was to understand very quickly the space and in the concept is going to work. It worked - we realised it is not really needed and moved to a different composition without building any walls and use the existing ones instead.

The idea for the central wall was to hide the straight edges of the room
and give the sense of a centre piece where the visitors would focus their attention to.
We decided to use landscaping in order to do that and in the following photos you can see some of it happen.

For me this image was a big inspiration, it shows
good use of texture, plants, light and space, in a
way this was a direction we went onto.

THE MAKING

We used boxes for the landscaping i n order to save up on carrying heavy ground and sand up and down the stairs (3 floor office building). We also got some second hand textyles from scrap in order to cover up the windows for the projection and to help with landscaping.
A very central part of the entire experience has to be the ability to immerse oneself and to have the feeling of being a part of nature. For this aspect we thought that mirrors can do a great job and that it is going to help make the space seem bigger.

Already some of the widows got covered and the boxes and textyles are in place, even some vegetation starts to appear.

We visited Essenbrug park as it was a huge inspiration for this project and started observing urban nature and what can we put into the film that we were projecting. It offered a variety of spaces and species, both plants and animals. Next we went onto some locations together and filmed urban nature in all forms.

We prepared ourselves with some tools for transporting ground and plants up there and made a strategy on where to get plants without being in harm to the nature.
Thankfully some friends of friends had a garden they do some farming and they allowed us to get some earth and plants from there. Then the specific plants we hunted on our bikes.

Once we had a bit of film and a dark room, we started trying out the projection. One of the elements we wanted to project is the sky and by some (LUCKY) coincidence we had two projectors. We projected the film in the middle but thought "hey what if we project sky at the same time?". This was interesting and led us try something more artistic with the projection. We ended up making a time lapse of the Rotterdam sky and projecting it on the left and right side of the central projection. For this we got a third projector and with a little bit reading we managed to link the projectors together and only use two laptops. We used only spotlights in order to enhance only certain areas and we discovered that the mirrors are very useful for it. Also parts from the projection were going to the mirrors and that created a more immersive ambient light. As we had different types of projectors, the light intensity was different, which was not very professional, but it is a smaller scale prototype of what the project could be and that was not the main focus point.

More and more plants started coming in and lucky for us there was construction works in the street nearby, where we borrowed a lot of sand from. We made the entire floor covered with it and that have completely changed the feeling of the space. What it did the most was when we hung up the branches. That for some reason made everyone say WOW you really changed the place. I believe it is because even though you still can see you are in a white room, the leaves and natural shapes of the branches trick your vision into thinking you're somewhere in nature.

When the installation was ready, we projected a four minute long film with a poem, narrated by a male voice with a lot of natural and bird sounds, together with some city sounds too. We filmed the entire thing and then the kids got interviewed about their experience.
SEE BELLOW THE VIDEO:

As a conclusion I can say that this came in to be a very interesting and multidisciplinary experience, I feel glad that I participated and helped someone.
I learned a lot from conceptual point of view and was a good exercise into working with other majors and understanding "client needs". I felt very stagnated from sitting on a computer and this was the type of activity that really moved me out and immersed me in nature. I wish that more of my work in the future is linked to pleasurable places and experiences as this. I know I have a tech related affection, but I also enjoy working with my hands a lot, this project was a good reminder and it will make me question my professional choices more in the future. Regarding graduation, I feel like it is a task that is doable by everyone and 2>1! Teamwork can really change things for the better! I am also super impressed by how little this actually costs.