Open Studios

Last week was the first time the project worked as a single system. This week was the first time anyone outside the studio saw it. Open Studios, the school’s annual public exhibition, ran for three days and brought visitors who had never encountered the project before. The task was to make something I had been building alone for months legible in the thirty seconds a stranger spends at a table.

Most of the week was not about code. It was about how the project stands in a room.

DESIGNING THE TABLE

The application is the core of the work, but an application running on a monitor tells a visitor almost nothing about what they are looking at. Someone walking past sees particles moving on a dark screen. Without context, that could be anything. The table setup had to carry everything the application cannot say on its own. What the project is about. How it works. Why it looks the way it looks.

The layout was planned on paper before anything was printed. Central demo station with monitor, keyboard, mouse, and headphones. Surrounding the station, eight posters arranged so that a visitor could read them in a natural order if they wanted the full story, or glance at any one of them alone if they only had a moment. On the table, a printed design statement with my name, student ID, project title, and a short explanation of the work.

The eight posters were divided into four functional groups.

The main poster stood on the far wall as the project’s identity. Title, subtitle, one representative image. This is what a visitor sees first from across the room, and what tells them whether to come closer.

The four-scenario storyboard next to the main poster walked through the visitor experience as a sequence. Taxi, landscape, region selection, arrival. Four frames, each with a caption, showing the user journey through the application without requiring anyone to actually use it. This worked especially well for visitors who did not want to put on the headphones.

The four religious architecture images showed the cultural basis for the Bugis interior. Not in text. In four photographs of the real buildings of Bugis at dusk, arranged side by side. The visual argument for coexistence is stronger than the verbal one.

The technical posters explained how the project works. A “PIC/FLIP PARTICLE” poster broke the pipeline into four stages with a frequency-to-force legend. Two “theme base material” posters explained the two visual languages of the project, which turned out to be important enough to need their own section below.

The teaser video played on the central monitor whenever no visitor was actively using the demo. The video compresses a full experience of the application into about a minute, showing the taxi arrival, the region selection, the Bugis interior, and the audio-reactive fluid in sequence. This gave visitors a reason to stop at the booth even if they did not want to interact with the live application themselves.

TWO THEMES, TWO POSTERS

Two of the eight posters were dedicated to the visual language of the project. These were the ones I spent the longest writing, because the project uses two different material languages that do different jobs, and a visitor who does not understand the difference between them is going to read the project as visually inconsistent when it is actually very deliberate.

The first is Prismatic Crown Glass. This is the Bugis interior. Glass buildings, transparent layering, visible refraction of what sits behind the surface. The reasoning is layered. Sound fills a space but has no form. Buildings rendered in glass are a visual equivalent. Chromatic dispersion, the way glass splits light into bass, mids, and treble of the visible spectrum, mirrors how a single sound splits into frequency bands. And in Bugis specifically, where four cultures coexist, glass lets each culture remain visible through the others without hiding anything.

The second is Retro Rim Light Hologram. This is everything outside the districts. The taxi, the driver, the region selection UI, the transitional spaces. Sound is invisible. Holograms exist only as light, without physical form. The project is about making invisible sound visible, and the hologram language at the main spaces announces that rule from the beginning. Before the visitor sees any fluid, they are already inside a world where things that should not be visible are.

The two languages are not blended. They are separate, and the transition between them is part of the experience. The hologram language greets you. The glass language is where you arrive. One is the promise. The other is the payoff.

THE THREE DAYS

The exhibition ran for three days. The first two days were manageable. A steady flow of visitors, enough time between conversations to reset, enough energy to explain the work carefully. The third day was the busiest by a wide margin. Visitors arrived in groups, conversations overlapped, explaining the same idea for the fifth time in an hour required a different kind of attention than explaining it for the first time. By the end of that day my voice was gone and my legs were tired, but I had spoken to more people in one afternoon than I had spoken to about the project in the entire rest of the year combined.

What struck me most was how different the visitor experience was from what I had anticipated while designing the setup. The posters I had spent the longest writing were not always the ones visitors spent the longest reading. The scenario storyboard, which I had considered supplementary, turned out to be the single most effective element at getting strangers to understand what the project was. The technical poster, which I was proud of, was mostly glanced at. The thing I learned is that in a thirty-second interaction, story beats information.

A closer look at the booth. The details that only came into focus once the installation was done and the exhibition was running.

FEEDBACK I GATHERED

Most of what I heard from visitors was some version of “this is cool” or “this is interesting.” Those responses are encouraging but they do not tell me what to do next. The comments worth writing down are the ones that noticed something specific or questioned something I had taken for granted. Alongside the spoken conversations, visitors left written feedback on sticky notes placed on the corner of the main poster.

Reading the sticky notes back, three things came up across them and across the in-person conversations.

1. 01

   The demo pulls people in, but the boards need more to bring them over

   Two visitors said this independently. The interactive demo is strong once someone is already at the station with headphones on, but the boards around it do not do enough to make a passerby stop in the first place. “Once you start playing you really realise how interesting it is. My only feedback is that maybe the boards and presentation can be better to bring people in.” And a second note: “Very cool visuals, but without it it’s quite hard to understand, so maybe the boards can have more content.” Same observation from two different angles. The gap is between the poster wall and the moment of interaction. The application already earns the visitor’s attention. The static material around it has to do more work to invite them to reach for the headphones.

2. 02

   The main poster had a typo that nobody in the studio had caught

   One of the sticky notes flagged a typo on the main poster. The title had been printed as “Where Sounds Breath” instead of “Where Sounds Breathe.” This was my mistake, and it went through studio review, installation, and two full days of the exhibition before a visitor pointed it out. The lesson is pragmatic. Proof by fresh eye. The people closest to a project are the worst proofreaders of it because they already know what it is supposed to say.

3. 03

   Bugis lands. The other districts need to catch up

   One note said “crazy good, just needs a bit more finishing with other locations.” This matches what I already knew but had not fully committed to. The Bugis interior is finished enough to carry the demo. The other districts are either placeholder states or not implemented. If a visitor comes to this project expecting Singapore and leaves having seen only Bugis, the project is under-delivering on its own premise. The weeks after Open Studios have to include finishing at least one more district to a comparable level.