What makes the Innovation Studio so innovative?

Since its launch in 2020, the Hill Library’s space has hosted scores of uniquely interactive exhibits.

Despite its welcome signs and inviting, open, glass wall, it might not be obvious what exactly goes on in the Innovation Studio. Located on the second floor of the south tower at the Hill Library, the room is dimly lit and there are four large white tables with what might seem like decals on them. But those decals are actually projections from above—images of icons and buttons to ‘press,’ text to scroll through, video and audio to watch and listen to. 

Defying expectations is one of the things that the Innovation Studio is all about. The tabletops are really interactive screens full of multimedia projects from students and faculty across all parts of the university—think hands-on science museum but with the work of students and faculty instead of a bicycle hooked up to a light bulb. You get the feeling that you’ve stumbled upon a real trove of something, and your hands start moving through the air to explore it—the tables work by motion, not touch.

You try out a Zines & Comics project from professor Maggie Simon’s ENG 305 class on women and gender in comics. Learning how to ‘press’ the buttons, you scroll through a description of the class objectives and the student assignments. And there’s an array of the actual student zines to pick up and look through there on the table, with titles like “My COVID Routine,” “Invisible Woman,” and “Another Body Another Trophy.”

On another table you find two plastic contour maps with an opalescent shine to them. Upon activating the project with a wave of your hand, you find they’re Austin Selley’s topographical 3-D prints. You read about the special color-changing filament that the College of Engineering student used and understand his process to integrate them into maps of the North Carolina landscape. Before you know it, you’ve learned about how maps are made, how 3-D printing is changing, and how NC State is at the forefront of all of it.

Then, on another table, you discover a portfolio of all the Master’s of Art and Design thesis projects from 2022—fourteen in total. You check out “Brand New Skin,” a conceptual role-playing game in which you get to be a vampire. There are screenshots and design elements to scroll through and a four-minute video that explains the identity politics behind centering a game upon being the monster rather than running around trying to kill the monsters.

“The Innovation Studio is meant to celebrate and catalyze innovation on campus,” says Adam Rogers, the Libraries’ Learning Innovation Librarian. “With our interactive exhibits, we showcase innovative projects from across NC State's many disciplines. And with our events and workshops, we are growing NC State students' understanding of innovation and its role in society, spurring their creative thinking, and giving them tools and methods for bringing innovation to their academic and other work.”

It would be easy to spend half the day in the Innovation Studio, moving among the digital humanities, data science, and visualization projects. But the development of the space—both conceptually and technologically—was far from easy. Just ask Erin Willett.

With possibility comes complexity
For two years, while getting an MFA in Art and Design at NC State, Willett served as Innovation Studio Graduate Extension Assistant at the Libraries. Willett’s background made her an ideal person to help develop and launch a space that would both support diverse scholarly projects across the university and thrill visitors with an ingenious, interactive display.

Before she came to Raleigh, Willett helped manage the InLight Festival and 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia after receiving her BFA in Fine and Studio Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her fine arts study and public events work was paired with experience in UI/UX design, Web development, motion graphics, AR/VR, and game development. She was excited to combine all of this in a job that was set to start in May 2020—but then the pandemic shut everything down just weeks before her start date.

Initially, Willett worked remotely with the Libraries and Relative Scale, a Raleigh-based experiential design firm, to design the profoundly hands-on Studio. Relative Scale, founded and run by NC State alums, created the interactive projection system, featuring a four-projector array with integrated depth sensors, all powered by a custom software platform. There were essential design decisions to be made quickly, and they had to be made over Zoom.

“The projectors were set and some of the system was in place, but there was still a lot of work to be done with getting the tables up and running and getting the hover-based system working,” Willett says. “I remember Relative Scale working from their offices and doing tests on the hover-based system. So it took quite a while of working remotely, trying to figure out what was the best overall design for the space.”

Willett finally arrived in Raleigh at the end of June 2020 and, with the Libraries’ Learning Spaces and Services and User Experience teams as well as Relative Scale, quickly began prototyping the tables and getting their interactivity to work.

“The novelty of the space was its biggest hurdle,” Willett says. “Since I knew how the system worked and had gotten so used to it, it was easy for me. But people who just came into the Studio for the first time wanted to use the images on the table as buttons and would try to press any object or image on the table. They didn't intuitively understand where the trigger points were.”

The team iteratively optimized the design of the experience of the space, programming a blinking hand symbol to appear where one’s hand needed to go and developing a handout and poster to guide visitors through basic usage. The biggest usability challenge, as it turned out, was the expected response rate of the tables.

“People are just so used to technology being really fast,” Willett says, “and if it's too slow, even by milliseconds, people get confused and give up. That was really eye-opening, that people have this mental model about how technology works, and a hover-based system where you have to hold for a second can go against that mental model of tap and something instantly happens.”

Getting the system to work was merely the first challenge; getting partners to deploy their content in it is another. Almost anything is possible on the Studio’s tables—from a basic text-and-image slideshow to the whole gamut of multimedia, chock-full of video and audio and interactive controls. There’s no template into which to pour an exhibit, so the first campus partners took a leap of faith.

One of the first big successes in the Studio was the Women’s Center 30th Anniversary exhibit—the Studio was packed with guests at its launch event in March. The interactive exhibit features a wealth of audio interviews. “Our Stories Matter: Redefining HERstory and the Meaning of Empowerment Through the Times” highlights NC State women who have paved the way for others by breaking barriers, opening the doors of possibility, and inspiring students to make a change.

“I was just snapping pictures, thinking it was so cool to have that many people in the space and seeing them using the system in a way that it was intended to be used,” Willett says. “They took a moment to figure out the controls, and then they were just diving into the content and saying ‘Oh, I recognize this person from the Women's Center history.’”

Willett’s position at the Libraries ended after she finished her graduate degree, and she has returned to Richmond to pursue other opportunities. But she found the experience of helping get the Studio up and running to be both professionally invaluable and downright inspiring.

“The Libraries team is just so supportive and focused on creating spaces that are built for learning,” Willett says. “There were times I would have a little event planned, and one of the hover things would be off, and I would call Ian Boyd who was doing usability on the Studio. And he would immediately answer and talk me through getting it working again, figuring out what technology is going wrong. That’s the kind of thing that allows this bespoke system to actually come to fruition and work.”

Driving and documenting innovation
The pandemic complicated the launch of the Studio, but the space is starting to hit its stride. After hosting several online workshops throughout the fall 2020 semester, the Studio opened to visitors that December—unfortunately still under pandemic limitations—and held a launch event in February 2021. Guests got a taste of the Studio’s teaching program in a fun, interactive exercise in “futures thinking” and heard about the debut slate of exhibits from the students and faculty who built them, including a look at NC State’s annual juried fashion show Art2Wear, a variety of recordings by NC State musicians through the Libraries’ State of Sound series, and the display from Dr. Simon’s zines class. Representatives from Relative Scale were also on hand to talk about the design of the projection system.

Within months of opening, the Studio was recognized with a MUSE Creative Gold Award in the “Experiential & Immersive” category. “The media experience is built around interactive projection and designed as a lightweight and touch-free approach to exhibiting curated works at the D.H. Hill Jr. Library,” the MUSE award release noted. “The application, and the content management system that underlies it, facilitates dynamic exhibition in a multi-use space—one that is central to a larger transformation happening in the Library. This exhibition platform affords a new approach to collecting student work (in digital and physical form) and sharing their stories, further situating the Library as a truly experiential forum and learning space.”

“The Libraries team had a unique and challenging vision for the Innovation Studio—and we loved the concept from day one,” said Luke Cline, Relative Scale’s Founder and Creative Director, in response to the award. “It was Relative Scale’s privilege to partner with the Libraries team in this endeavor. We couldn’t have asked for a better collaboration."

Slowly but surely—like everything after pandemic restrictions—the space has drawn interest from around the university and attracted collaborations and partnerships through its uniquely engaging possibilities for presenting work.

This summer, the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center and Learning Spaces & Services Department hosted Emerging Scholars Academy (ESA) students in the Studio. ESA is a pre-college summer preparation program designed for rising eleventh-grade students who identify as Black/African American or have an interest in Black/African American culture. Victor Betts, Student Success Librarian for Special Collections, showed the ESA students several exhibits including: “Existence as Resistance: The Magic in Blackness;” “(Re)Imagining Black Futures Through the Archives;” the “W.E.B. Du Bois Visualization Exhibit;” and “Stories of Solidarity and Change: the Legacy of MLK Jr. at NC State.”  Betts talked about the collaboration process with campus partners, as well as the value of experiential learning through interdisciplinary projects.

This fall, the Innovation Studio team offered its “futures thinking” game for students in the “Wicked Problems, Wolfpack Solutions” online summer course for incoming first-year and transfer students, to help them think creatively and critically about possible future outcomes. And, after partnering on a Libraries event in October 2021 with EnChroma, a company that produces special glasses for color blind people, and NC State’s Color Science Lab, the Studio developed an exhibit about the experience of color blindness and the work that the Lab is doing on campus.