Living Lab that explores the future of European Identity.
The New Europe is a pop-up experience suspended outside of the reality of daily life, where people are invited to collaboratively define who they want to be and how they want their world to be - in a New Europe. In the journey people were asked to create a new fingerprint, an alternative statement about their group's collective identity and perspective on European values.
We collaborated with architects and heritage experts to design the physical and mental journey. The journey begins by clustering visitors into small groups. Each group receives a "passport" - an interactive screen that they will share as an input machine as they move through the three spaces of the pavilion. As they move and interact with the passport, they define and refine their identity, values and sense of the collective.
First, they negotiate with one another to create a new identity, while seeing this identity reflected in an immersive distortion of light. As they place themselves on the sliders, a visualisation begins to build, arc by arc. They then move to the next room, where they continue to build the arcs that compose their collective fingerprint. As they make choices, they hear challenging statements that are culled from current affairs to historical documentaries, from politicians to everyday citizens.
Finally, after one last question, the explorers reach the reflection area - looking at their own "fingerprint" as it fits into a big grid of all the participants who have left an input thus far. This reflection area is in a large hammock, allowing for a keen potential for sociality and relaxed discussion of why and how each fingerprint might have turned out as it did.
Credits:
Living Lab was developed by CIID Research as part of the CoHERE project.
Experience Design: Annelie Berner
Creative Technologist: Matt Nish-Lapidus
Visual Identity: Henriette Kruse
Architecture: Harry Clover, Fabian Puller