Immersive installation Magenta Moon Garden – a playful approach to future education

The Magenta Moon Campus Berlin by Deutsche Telekom invites visitors of all ages to discover trends and events in a playful way – and to rethink current education concepts. Workshops, talks, maker spaces, an interactive escape room game: Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta Moon initiative has plenty to explore for everyone. At the heart of it all is the event’s dazzling, immersive Magenta Moon Garden by flora&faunavisions.

Designed to spark conversation around sustainability, tech and media skills in a playful and intuitive way, this interactive, walkthrough video installation comprises three distinct visual environments (Sunrise Garden, Moon Garden, Magenta Moon) enriched with intuitive, interactive real-time elements. The stunning environment and experience is flanked by online contents and events that tackle topics from hate speech to climate change, flanked by a wide spectrum of online contents, talks and on-site workshops.

The huge interactive media installation blends natural garden elements with zeitgeisty architecture to highlight vital issues and trending topics. The enchanting Moon Garden reveals its magic by moonlight: blooms open and glow, accompanied by soothing fragrances. The shifting, but predictable patterns of interactive sculptures and objects satisfy both mind and eye, making the Magenta Moon Garden a great refuge from the everyday bustle – a place for regaining strength and feeling safe and in control. Reflecting the move towards hybrid education concepts that mesh digital teaching with real encounters, the hybrid design combines digital and analogue facets in a seamless way. Here, visitors can raise virtual gardens – while smelling, tasting or picking the actual plants on display, experiencing them with all their senses.

Meanwhile, flora&faunavision’s no-touch concept and cleverly choreographed user journey ensure that visitors automatically keep the right distance while playing, learning or lounging, making the design studio’s approach a great example of how immersive events and installations can be staged safely in times of Covid-19. Such “phygital” (physical meets digital) approaches are the future, because:
“There’s no alternative to real-life encounters. But hybrid concepts that blend digital aspects with safe live experiences can offer new scope and space for such encounters. And serve as hopeful symbols of how to create a sense of normalcy in uncertain times.” Leigh Sachwitz

Antje Hundhausen, Vice President 3D Brand Experience at Deutsche Telekom, also champions such hybrid formats. “Since we want to dissolve the boundaries between digital and physical realms, we’re offering people plenty of opportunities – online and on location – to be part of it all,“ says Hundhausen. “Magenta Moon marks the start of our long-term initiative for more digital education and sustainability for all. Designed to serve as a fascinating learning platform and playground, it also invites everyone to look ahead – with plenty of courage, curiosity and optimism.”
Creating such convincing experiences required some impressive tech and expertise from the design experts. On location, huge wall and floor projections fill the entire space with poetic video content that reacts to visitor movements in real-time using the latest laser scanners. The team’s biggest challenge: translating this high-res experience to an up to 7-metre high and 36-metre long curved space with Surround Sound 5.1 to give guests a real sense of being part of a living digital canvas.

For school classes and anyone who loves to play, the media installation transforms into an outsized interactive game on digitization, media literacy and sustainability every half hour. As part of this exciting escape room game anyone with reading skills can learn to separate fake news from real facts while gaining plenty of valuable insights on diversity, climate change, new technologies or the future of education – and what they themselves can do to make a difference for our shared future.

Using sounds and harmonies, they compose their own, downloadable soundtrack for their journey to the enchanted Magenta Moon. And they leave the experience with a sense of excitement and self-assurance that flora&faunavisions founder Leigh Sachwitz wholeheartedly supports. “The interactive moments highlight a sense of autonomy – ‘It’s up to me what happens – I can do something to shape my own future.’”