︎︎︎ Awarded: 100 Graduation Works
     of the Year (Graduate 360)
     Shortlisted: NewOne Award 2022
     Multimedia
     Type design
     Typography
     Motion
     3D

This project explores how ancestral ways of storytelling provoke our imagination, how they become a platform for re-enchantment, as well as how the information age severs, dissolves imagination, and leads to disenchantment. Formally it involves participatory design, type design, motion design and info-sonification design. It is also a literature experiment–an architecture of poem in a 3D space with no fixed ways of reading it, created by collective imagination.


There are four parts in this project:
Cultural probe -> Font desgin -> 3D design/Interface -> Data visualization/animation

1    Cultural Probe

To start with, I designed a cultural probe: I recited the short story of the Hanging Garden of Babylon in three different versions according to historical texts, then asked them to choose whichever version to believe(or none of them) and draw their imaginations. After they finish their sketches, I interviewed them with the following questions:

How would you like to interactive with this place of your imagination? What would you like to do in it?
What emotions or thoughts are provoked by it?

26 people participated in this cultural probe. I created a zine displaying the results of people’s drawings. The Hanging Garden is chosen because it is a mythical architecture that has no archeological evidence and only exists in historical documentations, that is to say, all imaginations are equally valid, there is no absolute answer to it.

2    Font Design

Then I designed this script-based monolinear font. The restrictions for this font are:

It expresses the feeling of unwrapping of stories;
It can be used in 3D space.

3   3D Desgin & A Searching Interface

I integrated some features of participants’s drawings, created an virtual space where every bone structure is made of words. These sentences are collected from participants’ interview answers, curated according to it content. The font is ToScry Type which I customized for this project.

There is a search box on the top left corner of the interface. By searching the key words that represents emotions or actions, the virtual space turns around, zooms in and show you where the words are located.

4    Info to audio & Animation

Meanwhile, 200 tweets that mentioned "hanging garden" were collected. According to the order presented by the platform's algorithm, each post became a beat in the sound design. They were sorted into 15 categories, including commerce, art, music, history, entertainment, games, shows, etc., with each category representing one soundtrack. Morphing, a music video using the sound design, shows the constant morphing of the information architecture with the rhythm.