For the Surface Design Show 2005, a 3-day event about innovations in the field of surface material and design, The Design Laboratory will create The Sensory Gateway, an installation that aims to challenge our considerations of the built environment.

This responsive environment will react to touch and heat, triggering an array of applied technologies:
– elumin8‘s (see what they’ve done for the wine tower) weaved luminescent sheets will form sensory envelopes and paths that react to movement and sound,
– “Toile de Hackney”, Carole Collet’s latest intelligent textile, that responds to movement through thermic woven technique based on an ancient 18th Century French craft.
– Smart translucent skins for buildings, developed by Vector-Foiltec (see their amazing Eden Project in Cornwall, UK), that sense the environment, reacting like the human body to light, temperature and pressure.
– Abet Laminati‘s digitally printed sheets.
– Eleksen ‘s textiles that map gestures and trigger spatial reactions (other posts on the company).
– IFF fragrances will be impregnated into surfaces, dispersing perfumed nodes throughout The Sensory Gateway that are sensitive to movement and touch.

Miguel Rodriguez-Batista, Project Manager for The Sensory Gateway at The Design Laboratory, could only send me this image. That’s why I’m gonna book a ticket to London and see it by myself at the Surface Design Show 2005, Business Design Centre, on March 1-3, 2005.