Archea

Interaction Design Lab / 2024
led by Silvia Gasparotto, Michele Zannoni
Interaction and Experience Design Master / UNIRSM Design, San Marino
team: Laura Pesenti, Camilla Pozzi, Federica Zonta

/ IxD
/ Motion Design
/ Editorial Design

Archea is an interaction design project developed for MUSAS — the Archaeological and Historical Museum of Santarcangelo di Romagna — housed within the seventeenth-century Palazzo Cenci. The project addresses a recurring challenge in archaeological museums: artefacts displayed in isolation, stripped of their context, leaving visitors without a meaningful connection to the objects or the territory they come from. Archea reimagines the museum visit as a personal journey through time, weaving together past and present through narrative and interaction.

Archea explores this tension between object and territory, asking: what happens when an artefact is allowed to speak about where it comes from? Drawing on the concept of ritual as a design practice — the idea that meaning is activated through gesture, place, and collective memory — the project seeks to restore an invisible thread between the MUSAS collection and the living landscape of Santarcangelo.

Archea takes the form of six interactive stations, one for each selected artefact, distributed across the museum's floors. At the heart of each station is a custom-built platform — a three-panel wooden structure set at varying angles — which visitors step onto to begin the experience. Two circular positions on the first panel correspond to two temporal perspectives: past and present. Stepping onto one triggers a pressure sensor beneath the surface, which sends a signal to an Arduino board; this in turn communicates with a computer running Processing, which passes the data to MadMapper to activate a short-throw projector and launch the experience. The second panel displays the corresponding video, while the third — the most steeply inclined — hosts the map of Santarcangelo, designed as a graphic artwork and printed on self-adhesive vinyl, applied directly onto the panel's surface. The spot lights highlighting each location — both historical and contemporary — are projected and precisely mapped onto the vinyl through MadMapper, so that every point of interest is illuminated in response to the active station and the selected time perspective. Two visitors can engage simultaneously, exploring the same artefact from different points in time.

The interaction requires no manual input: the visitor's physical presence on the platform is the interface. The station fully developed for this project centres on the Index Nundinarius — a Roman market calendar slab — with the layout adapted to the room's dimensions, lighting conditions, and the artefact's position within the museum.

The final platform is designed to be built in lacquered white plywood; the working prototype was constructed in honeycomb cardboard, a lightweight material that allowed structural testing whilst keeping the model easy to handle and adjust.

Archea project book

Archea project book

Archea project book

Archea project book

Archea project book

Archea project book

Archea project book

Translating Pram

Teatro Vegetale

Gust

La Haine

Oedipus the tyrant king

Archea

Bilico

Radici