Journal / What works
01 · Technology choicesEvery experiential technology photographs well. The question that matters is which ones keep working after a thousand strangers have used them in the wrong light at the wrong angle.
Projection is the medium of the hero shot — vast, seamless, capable of mapping onto any surface — and the one most punished by reality. Its enemies are ambient light and physical interruption: a projection that dazzles in a blacked-out room turns to a faint ghost the moment a door opens onto daylight, and any object or person between projector and surface casts a shadow into the image. It can be magnificent in a controlled, dim, supervised environment and is a poor bet in a bright, busy, unsupervised one. The honest rule is that projection's quality is entirely contingent on conditions you can guarantee — control the light and the sightlines and it soars; assume them and it disappoints in exactly the spaces with the most foot traffic.
Self-lit screens — LED walls and commercial displays — are the unglamorous technologies that keep working, which is precisely why they have quietly become the backbone of permanent installations. They are bright enough to fight daylight, they do not care about shadows crossing them, and they run continuously for years. They lack projection's ability to wrap arbitrary surfaces, and a coarse LED wall viewed too close looks crude, but within their envelope they are predictable in a way nothing else is. For anything that must run unattended in public light, screens are the default to deviate from only for a specific reason, not the fallback. The experiences that are still running in year three are overwhelmingly screen-based, and that is not a coincidence.
Interactive surfaces are where ambition most often outruns durability. Touch is mature and robust when the hardware suits public abuse — but consumer-grade touch in a public setting fails fast, and a dead touch zone is worse than no touch at all because it invites and then frustrates. Gesture and camera-based interaction looks magical and behaves unreliably in crowds, variable light and the messy reality of people standing where the sensor did not expect. The design test for any interactive layer is what happens when it fails: an experience that becomes a static, still-attractive display when its interactivity dies has degraded gracefully; one that becomes a frozen error screen has not. Build for the failure mode, because the failure will come.
Augmented reality through visitors' phones is perennially pitched as the frictionless future and perennially throttled by the same friction: you are asking a stranger to download something, grant permissions and hold their arm up, and most will not. AR earns its place when the payoff is genuinely worth that effort and fails when it is bolted on for novelty. The quieter, more reliable cousin — a fixed interactive screen the visitor simply walks up to — converts far more people precisely because it asks nothing of them. Choosing technology for an experience is mostly an exercise in honestly counting the friction and the failure modes, then picking the least fragile thing that still delivers the idea. Spectacle is cheap to promise and expensive to keep.
02 — Interactivity & sensors →