Edison is 10x10-foot sculpture installed as the centerpiece of The Epiphany Hotel, a Joie de Vivre property in Palo Alto, California. It comprises 100 custom LED bulbs that are individually controlled in brightness and vertical position to create a 3D canvas of light and motion that spans the hotel’s two-story mezzanine from floor to ceiling. The installation pulls from a repository of code that “visualizes” generative algorithms, ambient movement, and other data and allows for infinite possibilities. The sculpture was designed as an open-source digital platform allowing people from around Silicon Valley to contribute code and participate in the piece.

Joie de Vivre was in the early stages of planning a boutique hotel for downtown Palo Alto in 2011 and asked us to help develop design principles (the site’s brand essence) and a novel experience touchpoint for the hotel. Joie de Vivre wanted to draw inspiration from the Bay Area and its history of technological innovations.

The challenge was to come up with designs inspired by the city of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley at large. Insights about the entrepreneurial hotbed, such as “encourage risk-taking,” “transparency,” and “sharing and building,” were used as starting points. We developed 11 concepts for innovative experience moments within the hotel that would speak to the brand and its location. Ideas like a multi-modal space to act as a forum for the biggest and newest ideas from the world, a collaborative working space designed specifically to encourage blank canvas brainstorming, all the way to smaller moments such as the option to donate and back a Kickstarter project when you check in were concepts that we believed would position the hotel well within the ecosystem it would become a part of.

The installation was one of many concepts that we moved forward with the hotel. It was initially conceived as a digital artistic expression that piques the curiosity and visualizes the networks and data flowing under Silicon Valley. Edison evolved into a reflection of the spirit of collaboration and innovation.

Because we have a background in interactive installations and many of our designers are based in Silicon Valley, we wanted to deliver more than just another work of art. We wanted to do something that had never been done before, with the latest technology, and make the underlying design transparent (so others could learn from it).

It is easy to use technology for technology’s sake (i.e., being the latest and greatest), but we wanted to avoid that. So, we created Edison as a piece that could stand the test of time and wouldn’t become dated or static. Instead, the installation is dynamic and able to evolve over time.

Furthermore, we wanted to make a piece that spoke to the intersection of technology that we are currently seeing—the indistinguishable interaction of hardware and software driven by networked connectivity. The Edison sculpture seamlessly integrates these disciplines and aims to elicit a sense of awe and fascination in its viewers.

Finally, we brought our aesthetic point of view to the piece (how it would look, feel, and fit into the hotel’s interior design). We partnered with a local LED startup to co-design and produce a limited-run, energy-efficient bulb that harkened back to the Edison filament model. We chose basic metals to reflect the light and heighten the visual prominence of the LED array.

After the brand strategy design, touchpoint moment concepting, and selection of the Edison concept, it was a long road of mechanical hardware, software, and electronics development. With a core team of 3, we developed the entire installation in parallel over 7 months, from blank sheet to unveiling.

The core system comprises 100 modular mechanical assemblies that are hot-swappable and contain the motor that spools the light up and down, a sensor to detect where the light bulb is, and a component to transfer power to the spooling wire. These are wired to 1 of 4 custom-designed PCB socket boards which each house 25 motor controllers and LED controllers. The socket boards each have a BeagleBone (tiny Linux-based computer) attached, which runs multi-threaded custom software to control and coordinate the motors and LEDs. Each BeagleBone communicates with a central Mac that runs the animations and distributes position and brightness commands over the network. The BeagbleBones parse and send respective commands to the motor controllers and LED controllers. An elegant system of coordination but non-trivial to engineer and build.

Designing the system architecture was an iterative process of working from prototype to prototype and integrating mechanical, electrical, and software considerations while thinking about scaling the prototypes for quantity and lifetime.

The mechanical module was designed for ease of assembly and maintenance, each one being hot-swappable with 4 screws. We used various fabrication processes for the production version: 3D printing, injection molding, milling, turning, sheet metal bending, laser-cutting, and welding. Nightly 3D prints were run of the database to ensure we were testing all components for lifetime considerations. We even designed our own tooling for the injection molding tools to get the spools to keep certain features within tolerance.

The software is designed as a distributed system, with messages and events being passed back and forth with a soon-to-be open source prototyping platform we developed in-house. This prototyping platform enables device-agnostic messages to be passed across a network, which allows our web interface to communicate with our BeagleBone micro-controllers (as well as Arduinos as backup) to monitor and maintain the system daily. The software system was designed to be completely modular, meaning it can handle 1 module to 10,000 modules without major changes to the code.

Electronically, we spent many weeks testing different motor controller chips and LED control chips, tuning the resolution we wanted and balancing capabilities with power envelopes that we had to stay within for UL approval. These components were integrated into a custom 8-layer PCB board designed and fabricated to handle the signal from all the different systems. In total, the system has 4 different custom PCB designs used, with half of a mile of wiring inside to route signals and achieve the final seamless result.

Finally, we worked with a fabricator to make a frame to specifications, so that we could easily install the hardware without having to lower the sculpture. Hidden panels swing open for maintenance access with components serviceable from a ladder.

Edison takes a holistic approach to an interactive installation, designing for lifetime, extensibility, and collaboration. The installation introduces a new way of executing this type of work: It takes risks, is designed to evolve over time, and can be examined by others for learning purposes. Edison is participatory and transparent by nature, paradigms that all of our work could benefit from as it increases the pace of innovation on all fronts. We put our best foot forward with this to try and start the transition.

In this vein, we worked to develop technologies from which others might benefit. The collaboration with the LED startup intended to reduce the power use of the entire installation to the equivalent of a hair dryer and to help the perception of LED bulbs shift toward something beautiful. We stress-tested our prototyping platform with the intention of releasing it as an open source product, so that others may develop fantastic new products. We developed hardware that could potentially help someone solve a mechanical actuation problem. We embraced the cycle of innovation and constructed Edison as a monument to both the technologies that came before it and those that will come after it, thanks to natural patterns of building off other people’s work.