Case study

Hyundai

Milan, Seoul, Busan

Three rooms for Hyundai. None of them explain anything.

Three cities, three years, three rooms for the same brand. Milan in 2019, the Motorstudio in Hanam in 2020, Busan in 2021. Each brief arrived through a different lead agency and each room had a different subject: interior design, hydrogen, four decades of car design. Underneath them all, the same question. How do you make someone care about a technology or a design decision before they understand it?

Purple and cyan light particles fill walls and ceiling above a car

Staff gesture toward a large screen displaying Korean interactive text

What we built

Milan, Design Week 2019. Style Set Free. A design study car stood at the centre of the room as a sculpture, carrying twelve minutes of mapped animation across its surface, synchronised to multichannel sound and a colour changing light concept. Next door, a monochrome room that visitors changed with their hands. A temperature sensitive plate on a white cube shifted the colour of the entire space depending on the warmth of the touch, how long it lasted, and how many people joined in. On the far wall, their own shadows came back to them with an animated aura that grew denser the closer they stepped.

Hanam, 2020. An immersive space inside Starfield Hanam, one of the busiest shopping centres in Seoul. Eighty five custom LED screens wrap the visitor at 270 degrees, carrying 52K of content produced for this one room. The journey follows the four elements of Hyundai's fuel cell technology: sun, water, energy, air. Morning light in slow gradients. Droplets hanging without gravity, then bursting to fill shapes cut to the exact geometry of the walls. Hydrogen and oxygen meeting in the fuel stack, power made visible as an event rather than a chart. Sensors trigger reactive content as people move through, an interactive table opens four narrative chapters and two game modes, and a hydrogen emoji greets everyone who walks in.

Busan, 2021. Reflections in Motion, the Motorstudio's first design exhibition, built around time. Two cars, forty years apart. For the Heritage Series PONY, a graphic road trip through the manufacturing years of the seventies and eighties, scored in 8-bit. For the Prophecy, nature shot in high contrast and near darkness. Between them runs the parametric pixel, flat and graphic at the start, a three dimensional body by the end, splitting images into recursive detail and pulling them back together. The sound develops along the same curve, from video game simplicity to a full electronic sphere.

The challenge

Fuel cell technology, interior configuration and four decades of design history have one thing in common. All three are easy to explain and almost impossible to make anyone feel. Each of these rooms sat somewhere full of competition for attention: a design week, a shopping centre, a showroom, with visitors who had not come to learn anything. Hanam added a second problem. The get-in fell into the first months of the pandemic, so 52K of content across 85 screens was reviewed in virtual reality and installed remotely, by a team that had never stood inside the finished room.