“An interesting use of a window display to provide unexpected interaction with people. Beautifully designed, with impressive tech powering it—and just overall very cool!” —Laura Hobson
“Beautiful, intelligent, futuristic, hopeful—everything you would hope to see from Google.” —Pam Scheideler
Overview: With an expanded presence in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, Google wanted to create an installation for its new 9th Avenue lobby that would serve as a friendly fixture in the community—something to bring people joy. Google tapped Pittsburgh-based design firm Deeplocal to transform a low-profile corner lobby into a friendly, dynamic presence. The kinetic exhibit Flowers uses real-time sensing and machine learning to respond to visitors in the lobby during the day and passersby during the evening.
The installation uses Grasshopper and Python for the algorithmic layout, positioning and ceiling integration of the flowers; Solidworks’s FEA solvers and custom linkage geometry calculators for the flower mechanism; and Node, openCV, PoseNet and Python for the sensing, gesture recognition and back-end control software.
The flowers are fabricated with matte powder-coated metal and specially printed Tyvek for the colored interiors.
From concept to completion, Flowers took Deeplocal three years to create—with one year spent on active creative and engineering development.
Comments by Jake Marsico, executive creative director, creative technology, and Emily Price, vice president
of marketing:
What would you say are the core features of the project? “Designed in a modular fashion and hung from the lobby ceiling, Flowers features pops of color and layered interactivity for visitor and community engagement,” say Jake Marsico and Emily Price. “The exhibit’s various modes and animations are driven by real-time sensing and machine learning. When they recognize movement, the flowers open slightly and reveal a subtle color shift. As lobby guests linger underneath, the fixtures blossom open fully, revealing a vibrant interior.
“In crowded scenarios, the system goes into a generative autopilot mode that mimics the kinetic energy of the space,” they continue. “Additionally, there is a small screen on the 9th Avenue–facing window that provides hints to evening passersby to perform a specific gesture, triggering a surprise blooming sequence. Sensor data is for real-time interaction only; data is never stored or viewed.”
How did this project compare with others? “We work with a world-class client roster, including Google, Meta, Netflix, Shopify and TikTok, among others,” say Marsico and Price. “To best support them, we lean into three dedicated areas of creative engineering: our Events & Experiences, which specializes in experiential marketing; our Permanent Exhibits division, which focuses on interactive exhibits and environments in architectural spaces; and our Product division that focuses on the development of Gumband, an OS for interactive environments. All three are driven by Deeplocal’s culture of invention and expertise in creative technology.
“Led by our Permanent Exhibits team, Google Flowers was truly an interdisciplinary project,” they continue. “The flower’s mechanism evolved from a simple origami prototype into a complex electromechanical fixture. In addition, designing an interactive system both inside and outside the lobby required a breadth of expertise, including algorithmic design and integrated industrial design, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering.”
