Hyundai Card, Seoul Metropolitan Government, 2009
Location: Seoul Station, Seoul, Korea
Participation: Public Experience & Environmental Design
Winner of IF, Red Dot and IDEA Design Award (Gold Prize)
This bus station is installed at Seoul Train Station Bus Transfer Center (South Korea), and it is a public structure, realizing over-scaled media with about 36,400 LEDs on the transparent glass surfaces. There are 12 bus shelters with the size of 8mX2.5m(W x H), and walls and ceiling glasses of all the shelters are the displays for low pitch pixel animation.
Each structure creates integrated locative media which promotes mutual interaction between people and environment through a motion detecting system, urban bus information system(BIS), IR bus arrival sensor, and online networks.
The purpose of the Seoul Metropolitan Government was to build a horizontal landmark that provides people with a more advanced bus-waiting environment. And this shelter, as a social contribution of Hyundai Card company to the city of Seoul, should also function as a promotion space, conveying the value and identity of the company.
How might we turn a bus shelter into an informative and interactive urban fabric that provides social communication among people, the company, and the city?
We intended to integrate interactive media into the structure to achieve our goal. And as a public element that is installed outdoor environment, we also needed to consider some aspects in terms of the shelter's design. Therefore, we established five design principles for the new shelter as below.
• Embodiment of the Brand presenting the company's identity
• Minimal shape & structure for historic city space
• Transparency for maximizing interactions among the users
• Monocoque structure unified for easy maintenance
• Consistent design identity : Subsidiary facilities, such as safety fences, streetlights, and bus maps are designed with identical design scheme
It adopts to Power GlassTM: a German lighting product, to realize transparent animation with customized production. All the LED modules are protected by 18mm thick double-layered glass from the inside, and transparent natural resin improves the durability and intensity of the panel.
Double-sided LED modules with a 100mm gap between each pixel create perfectly transparent footage. Also, it wires the LEDs with ITO(Indium Tin Oxide) coating: a transparent thin film with electrical conductivity. Moreover, the internal surface of a glass diffuses lights with ceramic dot print, increasing the optical effect of images.
Connect people to the system by providing them with real-time urban information like BIS. The shelters helps people distinguish the buses approaching before arriving, tracking the movement of buses and showing them on walls as a visual representation.
The shelters facilitate interaction among the people with sound and visual, tracking the mutual movement of users and displaying public media art generated by user participation on walls.
Help people interact and connect with the environment, displaying urban information, such as dates, weather, and traffic.
