Selected Work / Solstice
Solstice
A touring immersive installation — one day of light compressed into twenty minutes, and the visitor is inside it.
Solstice, a touring installation · Experiential design · 2026
Role
Experiential Design & Creative Direction
Scope
Concept, spatial, light & sound, interaction
Outcome
26-minute average dwell in a 20-minute piece
Overview
Solstice is a touring immersive installation that compresses a full day of light — dawn to zenith to dusk — into twenty minutes, and puts the visitor inside it. I led the concept, the spatial design, the light and sound score, and the interaction that makes the room respond to the people in it.
The challenge
Immersive has become a genre of projected wallpaper: big screens, loud music, a queue for a photo. The brief I set: an experience with no screens and no narration that still holds a room of strangers for twenty minutes — and that earns its scale instead of just having it.
My strategic thinking
I wrote the piece in time before designing it in space. Solstice is a score: every zone has a light state, a sound state and an emotional target, and the arc of the day — build, flood, turn, fade — is the structure. Light is the medium, not the decoration. If the room needs a caption, the room has failed.
Process
The score first — the light-intensity and sound-density curves that define the twenty minutes. Then the five zones mapped onto a one-way circulation with no dead ends, the responsive amber surface that lets visitors pull tones from the score, and the afterglow: a four-minute hold at the end with no cue to leave.
The design system
Three rules govern everything: no screens, no narration, no exit rush. Five zones — Threshold, First Light, Zenith, The Turn, Afterglow — across 900 m² of one-way circulation. Depth sensors read where bodies are, never who they are; the capacitive wall blooms light under a hand. No cameras, no faces, no data leaves the room.
The final solution
A twenty-minute walk through a day. It opens in ninety seconds of near-darkness so your eyes adjust and your expectations drop, builds to a full amber flood at Zenith, then turns — and ends by not ending, holding the afterglow long enough that nobody wants to be the first to move.
Results
140,000 visitors across three cities, a 4.9/5 visitor rating, and the number the whole design was aimed at: a 26-minute average dwell in a 20-minute piece. People stay past the end. That was the brief.
Lessons learned
Experiential design is choreography, not decoration. The temptation is to add — another projection, another sound, another surface. The work is in the restraint: build a room that does one thing precisely, and then trust the audience to feel it without being told.
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