Project
Two spaces, the DISPOC study room at the San Niccolò complex and the LabVR at Santa Chiara Lab, reworked through a graphic project on the walls
DISPOC Unisi: environmental graphics for study and research spaces
- Client
- University of Siena
- Area
- Identity
- Year
- 2022-2023
Two research spaces at the University of Siena, in two different buildings. On the third floor of the San Niccolò complex is the study room of DISPOC, the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences. At Santa Chiara Lab is the LabVR, the University's virtual reality laboratory. Dinamo designed the environmental graphics for both. In the study room the work continues the department's coordinated image, produced in previous years.
Environmental graphics in universities often comes down to a question of visual consistency: the right colours, the logo in the right place, walls that are less bare. Here the starting question was different. What should these walls say to the people who spend their days between them?
Content that prompts study and learning
The study room: the concept wall
The central piece in the study room is a concept wall, experimental in the full sense of the word. Looking at it, you grasp, simply and intuitively, the disciplinary, thematic and methodological connections practised in the department. Sociology, political science, anthropology, semiotics, media studies, economic geography, political economy, and the themes that run across them: public opinion, elections, democracy, populism, consumption, micro-social interaction, nation building. The wall makes visible what an interdisciplinary department declares itself to be. Anyone studying there sees their own discipline inside a network of connections, not in isolation.
The study room: the voices and the furnishings
Around the concept wall, a series of posters gathers the voices of the authors that department reads and teaches: Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Daniel Kahneman and others. The quotations enter the study space as intellectual company, not as ornament. Completing the installation are adhesive wall pieces and movable dividers with a double function, informative and decorative, which organise the space without making it rigid. The whole stays within the department's coordinated image, and carries it from paper to the walls.
The LabVR: telling the story of a young discipline
The LabVR at Santa Chiara Lab is a space with state-of-the-art virtual reality technology: an immersive cave room and a set of Oculus headsets for simulations. It is a space turned towards the future, and precisely for that reason the choice was to look back, at the discipline's young past. A timeline marks the crucial moments of virtual reality over the last hundred years. Two large-format posters are devoted to the pioneers Ivan Sutherland and Jaron Lanier. A third poster takes on the concepts of presence and immersion, the theoretical heart of what happens when you put the headset on. Anyone entering the laboratory finds the history of the technology they are about to use.
