AIGA 100 Interactive

The AIGA Gala is an annual event that celebrates and honors luminaries from the world of graphic design. The 2014 Gala had the added honor of falling on the AIGA’s Centennial year, and celebrated more medalists than ever before. The event, which was emceed by Pentagram’s Michael Beirut, brought together hundreds of supporters to and celebrate the legacy and future of the AIGA.

COLLINS transformed the stories of the twenty four AIGA medalists into a two-part design. The first piece is a physical artifact: a book that celebrates the work and careers of the medalists. The second is an interactive installation, which expanded the principles behind the book design into the architectural scale. The installation's theme was "time" - specifically the 100 year history of the AIGA. To visualize this timeline, we built an eighteen-foot canopy of 100 white discs, based on our cover design for the Gala program. Inspired by work by artists and designers such as Humans since 1982, we used animated clock faces to create patterns and typography. We built custom software to project these clock faces onto each disc. Attendees could connect to and interact with the installation through their mobile phone or iPad stations to a custom web-based interface we built for the installation. As the guests interacted, they unlocked stories by each medalist about the key point when their careers began.

Taken together, the two pieces of the design program are meant to both celebrate the rich history of the AIGA and to look ahead to the future of design: work that is hyper-connected, fundamentally collaborative, and blurs the line between the physical and the virtual.