The Sentiment Cocoon: A Case Study of Media Architectural Interfaces

Media Architecture is uniquely positioned to merge built form and digital information, which can augment existing architectural contexts with socially relevant digital information. This paper presents a design case study to illustrate exactly how this merging can happen in the progression of a Media Architecture design process within different city contexts. By outlining the steps in the Sentiment Cocoon project from design intent to realisation we will show how the objective to bring real time human emotion into architectural context influenced each stage of the design. We explore emergent interaction patterns and behaviour. The role of prototyping interactive systems, algorithm development for data visualisation, light and material interactions, structural design and site context are evaluated in terms of how they serve to merge information and built form with the social core of a busy engineering office space compared to an outdoor implementation within a botanical garden as part of the biggest lighting festival in the world. Within this previously developed Media Architectural Interfaces (MAI) provide a useful framework to interpret the results.