WATER CIRCLE TREE | interactive light installation 

Design | nesso.design

Location | Tianjin, China 

Year | 2021

nesso.design recently completed an interactive installation in the main atrium of the Tianjin Season City Commercial Centre. Season City Commercial Center is the main commercial entity of Binhai Eco-City in Tianjin. The client hopes to inject an eco-conscious design by integrating new digital technologies.

The steel structure serves as a main attraction, with a height of over 25 meters, it has a great visual impact, but balanced with the rest of the interactive installations already present and themed of “Dreaming Forest” The first approach of the design team with the site had a great impact on the final result, seeing how the roots entrenched in the ground point upwards, crossing the entire structure in an intertwining of lymphatic tracts, until they reach the cloud of the upper skylight.

The correlation between the structure, in concept of the entire Binhai Eco-City area, and the cycle of rain was clear in each single detail. Thus, when haac began developing the design, they introduced an element, such as falling leaves, capable of balancing the massiveness of the steel structure. All this is accompanied by a system of LED (strips and pixels) which, thanks to the creative coding, envelops and enlivens the entire structure, making it dynamic and never predictable.

The executive design was extremely simple in its concept part, a little more complex and challenging in implementation. The heart of the concept was to link the creative coding with a data source that is always different but not rendered, which had a core base. so it was natural to connect the entire structure consisting of over 10,000 pixel LEDs with the Tianjin meteorological data centre.

An algorithm written in Python reads the quality of the air, direction and intensity of the wind, degree of humidity and atmospheric pressure, translating them through various scripts in Tuchdesigner into graphic effects to be displayed on the entire structure.

In this way a gloomy day can be balanced with bright colors and lively movements inspired by the migration of butterflies, as, otherwise, a high noon can be balanced by cold and strongly contrasted colors in order to use only the actually perceptible color frequencies and save energy.

The two design principals Abudi Baradi and Antonio Minonne commented: "the most satisfying thing about this project was the application of interactive technologies not as a superfluous layer in addition to the end of the process, but as the backbone of the concept."