Immersive Experiences
The Library of Congress holds 184 million items, the largest collection in the world. For most of its history, seeing them required a reader card, and you had to be sixteen to get one. It is, at heart, a research institution. As the Library’s Shari Werb puts it, this is a place where people are “reading to learn, not learning to read.”
The idea for a gallery of their own began with a letter. A young boy wrote to the Librarian of Congress with a simple question: why did he have to wait years to explore somewhere that sounded so wonderful? The Library took it seriously and built The Source, a 4,000-square-foot experiential gallery for kids ages 8 to 15.
Hyperquake designed the digital experiences at the core of the gallery, working alongside exhibition designers SKOLNICK Architecture PLLC. Our charge was a deceptively hard question: how do you turn a child into a researcher? The answer was to make research something kids do with their hands. We worked closely with the Library and tested every idea with real kids, then built a set of physical-digital interactives that follow the Library’s own research process. A child picks up an artifact, scans it, and its story opens up on a screen, ready to study the way a researcher in the reading room would.
