Inspired early in his career by Bucky Fuller, Ed Schlossberg’s dream is fueled by the power of human interactivity.

Edwin Schlossberg has long dreamed of building an immense high-tech game arena in the middle of Times Square where hundreds of people playing together at any hour would control power grids, move investments, or create structures to revitalize urban spaces. If this sounds suspiciously like pop-culture utopia, it’s because Schlossberg – the grand master of human interactivity – believes that games and other shared experiences inspire cooperative relationships among strangers. Although this costly dream has not been realized, conceiving interactive environments for the masses in his mission. Schlossberg’s most recent project, the "spectacular" on Reuters’s new world headquarters in Time Square, is not just another mammoth advertising billboard but an unparalleled opportunity to engage the public in collective experience.
All the public and institutional spaces Schlossberg has designed during the past 30 years – museums, parks, recreational areas, information kiosks, study centers – are built on the foundation of mutual reliance. His current works in progress, including two branches of a children’s museum, a hospital environment for kids, and an arboretum, offer various ways to have conversations in public places while raising the stakes of interactive experience.

Schlossberg, 56, was a pioneer of experience design long before the Internet made the concept popular. The inspiration hit him in 1965, when at the age of 19 he attended a series of lectures at the New York YMHA featuring Marshall McLuhan, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. It was Fuller’s ideas about "Spaceship Earth" – how to make the world work better for more people by doing the most with less – that enthralled him. The precocious Schlossberg had already befriended Jasper Johns and John Cage, who later introduced him to Fuller. In 1968 Fuller made him teaching assistant at Southern Illinois University. At the time Sclossberg was pursuing a doctorate in science and literature, and his work with Fuller added design to this calculus.

For Schlossberg design was not about rearranging the aesthetics of the physical world but making fundamental philosophical changes with existing structures that would have the greatest benefit for the most people. So in 1969 he helped organize the World Games, Fuller’s innovative strategy to promote human cooperation by enabling players to solve global problems. This was Schlossberg’s first exposure to mass-scale interactive experience and provided the foundation for much of his future work.
In 1971 Schlossberg received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, published his thesis (an imaginary conversation between Albert Einstein and Samuel Beckett), and joined the staff of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, where for six years he designed an interactive milieu based on the exploration of earth, wind, and fire in which kids physically generated the power that ran the exhibits. In 1977 he founded the New York based Edwin Schlossberg Incorporated (ESI) to create exhibits, kiosks, games, futuristic teaching tools, and new ways of transforming solitary activity into mutually supporting networks.

"The idea that you make an experience that requires a conversation in a public place is training for the fact that culture is collective," Schlossberg says. Indeed his design cannot function without proactive participants. His practice is rooted in the idea that people’s experiences of things are enhanced through the contributions of others to the same experience. Direct engagement is Schlossberg’s métier, and the signature high-tech gadgetry that makes his project come alive is not an end but a means to draw audiences out of their complacency. "The history of the world is alive only in the nervous system of everybody alive right now," he says. "Culture only exists dynamically."

Schlossberg’s firm has created a number of highly visible cultural and corporate environments, including the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island; the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center, in Washington, D.C.; Innovation Station at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan; and the Sony Wonder Technology Lab, in New York. At the ESI offices on lower Sixth Avenue, where more than 50 designers and technicians work together in small development teams, there is no house style. The products and graphic interfaces are guided by functional concerns rather than fashion. Each commission is routinely redefined to determine goals that will engage the largest number of people. The initial client meeting is a jumping-off point in Schlossberg’s quest to find greater group dynamics. But there is another instigating force: "The hardest thing in invention is always the emotional engagement, not the figuring-it-out part," he says. "The figuring-it-out part is what you do every day. To be emotionally engaged, and figure out how can we get a client to sustain a level of effort in a particular project, is the real challenge."

These days Schlossberg is intensely engaged in the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles. Targeted at kids four to eleven, the museum has two branches, one at Art Park in Little Tokyo and the other on the Hansen Dam site, in the San Fernando Valley. The former will be housed in a building designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis and open in 2006; the latter, by Sarah Graham of Andelil/Graham/Pfenninger/Scholl Architecture, is scheduled for 2004. Each building demands a different theme relating to its locale: the Hansen Dam branch is literally set into the landscape, so its theme is the environment; the downtown branch will be about city planning.

Traditionally a museum is a communication between a curatorial vision and an audience – and typically when people create institutions for children they want to shout that the environment is E-X-P-R-E-S-S-I-V-E. Usually they fill a room with worktables, paints, and other tactile materials, although what the kids actually express is sometimes less important than the act of making it. For expressiveness to succeed, Schlossberg says, children must have a genuine connection with the space they’re in. The centerpiece of these two branches is called the "Big Fun Cool Thing," a series of projects and happenings linked by high- and low-tech gizmos. Upon entering the Hansen Dam branch, kids will look up to find a stream of water running through a transparent gutter next to a serpentine pneumatic tube with pictures, drawings, and messages shooting by. This is adjacent to a long LED displaying digital messages. Near that is a movable rack like in a dry-cleaning store, with more things clipped to it, and finally a circuitous conveyor belt that spreads even more information throughout the hall. The attached material allows children to explain, communicate, and exchange their ideas, which then become the centerpiece of the museum for that day of the week. When the kids log themselves into the building they’re asked, "How high are you in sneakers?" or "What color are your eyes?" The input devices are levers and doohickeys children can touch and move (ironically there are no screens).

ESI has also created places where kids can make stuff: an art studio, a workshop, and a kitchen with big vats of cornstarch, flour, and water (similar to Playdough). In the center of the center of the space a 30-foot computer driven tree is a wellspring of activity; visitors can take the water off the tree to feed the roots (the more water you feed it, the greener the leaves get at the top). Next to the kitchen is a place where kids can make food for the tree. The point is to have things in the museum that require kids’ intervention to survive. And there is an interactive waterfall that also serves as a cooling agent for the museum. Graham’s overriding idea is to make the building ecological balanced, which means eschewing massive air-conditioning units.
Schlossberg not only preaches cooperation, he practices it. "The ideas get better through collaboration with the designers," he says. "It isn’t ever one person’s vision. Do I influence it a lot? Yes. But it’s so iterative, so complicated, and there are so many people involved, that it has to be a team effort."

Diane Klein, managing director of ESI, says that when the design work starts, "the environmental designers, writers, graphic designer, and interactive designers brainstorm on how the flow should be, the specific activities in the environment, the tone of the environment, and other aspects. Then we all review one another’s work to make sure it fulfills the design challenge." If the client has hired an architect already, Klein adds, "this is a good point to start working with them to discuss what concepts they have for the structure. Ideally they haven’t started design work, and we can help them to allocate space based on the exhibit’s needs."

Many of Schlossberg’s concepts rely on in-house software innovations. One of them in development is a program for a new visitor’s center commissioned by the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, in Clermont, Kentucky, a 16,000-acre park scheduled to reopen in 2003. After determining that the underlying goal was to build a greater presence in the region for the long-standing facility, Schlossberg introduced an alternative idea: forget the building altogether and put core information on a handheld GPS-generated PDA containing everything a visitor needs to know. "The PDA is nothing more than a portable laptop without a keyboard," he says. "People feel it’s something they can control." ESI created a computer-organized filing system of horticultural and environmental stories about the place, then layered on poetry, folk songs, tales, and other information.

"In a certain way your nervous system is a part of the process," Schlossberg says, returning to one of his core themes. He is quick to reject unnecessary imposition of technology on human experience, so the arboretum PDA simply makes suggestions. As soon as, say, a holly tree is clicked, the device asks, "Would you like to see it as a seedling?" or "Would you like to see it in March?" Visitors can watch the tree growing in a manner that could not be seen in any other way. "But the conclusion isn’t drawn for you." Schlossberg says. During an average three-hour stay at the park the visitor should "intervene" with the PDA for no more than 15 or 20 minutes. Its primary function is collective memory; a built-in camera and recording device take pictures and saves sounds, which can then be downloaded onto a home computer or printed out at an information kiosk.

For another work in progress, "Companions in Courage," a space designed to help kids cope in children’s hospitals, Schlossberg was asked to create a special room filled with computers and video games. They playrooms in most children’s hospitals are dreary, so any upgrade would be an improvement, but Schlossberg sees it as an opportunity to empower rather than divert. "I don’t think they want to go into some robot world or the Matrix," he says. "What they really want to do is get back to their lives, and what we want to do is give them the tools to recontrol their current lives."

Consequently Schlossberg has designed a communication system that involves giving the kids "keys" that allow them access to the room while they are patients; after they leave the hospital they maintain contact through an intranet site. There will be a surfeit of Xbox games (Microsoft is the sponsor), but these diversions are parts of the whole setup, with e-mail capabilities and online extensions designed so kids can achieve a semblance of normalcy. Prototypes will launch next spring at the Buffalo and Los Angeles Children’s Hospitals; each requires only a small space (the Buffalo facility is 600 square feet, L.A. is 1,200). To reduce the cost of installation, the components will be produced as furniture that fits into an existing room, which Schlossberg describes as "an igloo, with monitors." Later the model will be launched in other hospitals around the country.

Designing a monumental sign in Times Square does not initially appear to satisfy Schlossberg’s interactive agenda. But the Reuters digital spectacular (shard with Instinet, an investment brokerage subsidiary) is a tremendous interactive challenge, because within a few seconds it must engage frenzied passerby who are yanked in many directions by some of the most elaborate illuminations in the world.

Thomas Glocer, CEO of Reuters UK, and Devin Wenig, president of Investment Banking & Brokerage, Reuters America Holdings Inc., commissioned the gigantic video screens to introduce the company to the American public now that it has relocated from its historic base in London to New York. But Schlossberg balked at doing a promotional billboard. "Nobody outside of the news business knows what Reuters is," he explains. "You could spend billions advertising what Reuters does, and everybody is going to say, ‘You deliver the news to other people. So what?’ If you want to create strength for what you’re about, you have to make it visible."

The multiscreen sign starts at the top northeast corner of the building as a narrow strip, then descends into larger interconnected screens wrapped around the north side before plunging into the lobby. The projected information switches between 15 different templates framing Reuter’s various news-gathering and financial services. But this is not simply a news "zipper." Schlossberg’s core concept is for the content to "assemble" from small to large images, from letterforms to readable texts and pictures. "This is a McLuhanesque idea," he says. "that the more your eyes work, the more you participate in the experience."

The chaotic cascading flux draws the viewer into the sign as graphic components build onto images, metaphorically underscoring the notion that news does not happen magically. "It’s something people actually make," Schlossberg says. Also featured are feeds from world news, the stock exchange, video reporting, and photographs orchestrated into computer-driven animation formats. R/GA created and produced the graphic interface that allows the content to kinetically fly and slide down the sign. Yet the most innovative conceptual feature – the one designed to make this something of a destination for news-hungry people – is an index (or thermometer) that measures the intensity of news on any given day: hot, cold, or mild on a scale of one to ten. What determines a hot news day (when news comes from a single story) or a cold one (when stories derive from all over the globe) will be communicated through an algorithm developed by FingerPost in London used to quantify the variable data. At the bottom of the sign appear baselines for the specific day to give a historical perspective (i.e. the terrorist attack in the World Trade Center was the hallmark event for September 11). The goal is that at any given moment viewers will feel the world’s pulse, as reported by Reuters.

This is not the kind of human interactivity Schlossberg eventually hopes to introduce with his Time Square arena, nor does it entirely reflect his concerns about generating people power through collaborative activities. Still, it’s one of the most intensive conversations in a public place that he has instigated to date – and everybody who sees it will attest that it’s one of the biggest, funnest, coolest things on the block.

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