City of Portland · 2023
Migrations
A bird sculpture visitors light up from their phones, for the Portland Winter Light Festival.
- Client
- City of Portland
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Interactive Experience Designer, Developer
- Stack
- Web App, Interactive Lighting, QR, Realtime, Physical Installation
The project
A physical and digital installation for the Portland Winter Light Festival exploring the experience of migration. The centrepiece was a large-scale bird sculpture in structural steel and tensioned architectural fabric, paired with a web application visitors accessed by scanning a QR code on-site.
Through the app, visitors could read migration stories submitted by others, send heart reactions that triggered waves of red light through the sculpture, and release their own coloured origami birds, illuminating the piece in the colour they chose.
The installation achieved an 83% visitor engagement rate across two festival weekends, among the festival’s most popular installations, with over 1,200 migration stories submitted through the companion app and more than 5,000 origami birds released to illuminate the sculpture.
