Interactive Model of Lower Manhattan Wins IDSA Award

Wall Street Rising’s interactive model of Lower Manhattan.

The interactive architectural model of Lower Manhattan designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for Wall Street Rising’s Downtown Information Center won an Industrial Design Excellence Award, the Industrial Designers Society of America announced today. Co-sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and the IDSA, the awards recognize the best product designs of the year.

Founded in the wake of 9/11, Wall Street Rising is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the historic, cultural and economic interests of Lower Manhattan. The model, developed on the concept of a communal table, creates a shared space where visitors to the center can gather to learn about the history and opportunities of the area. Using a gyro-mouse, users can highlight streets, buildings and other points of interest, receive practical information about local museums, restaurants, shops and neighborhood events, view historic and contemporary photographs or watch short documentary films. These graphics are all seamlessly projected onto the 3-D model from two digital projectors hung from the ceiling.

Like the famous Panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum of Art, the model of Lower Manhattan fascinates viewers with a bird’s eye view of the city. Three feet tall and encased in plexiglas, the Lower Manhattan model allows visitors to lean over and peer through the model’s case, heightening the interactive experience.

The model also educates visitors about the history of Lower Manhattan through eight short documentaries projected onto the table, beginning with Dutch New Amsterdam (1625–1664) and continuing through Downtown Today and Tomorrow (since 2001). Each approximately 1:30 minutes long, the documentaries can be selected and played as separate scenes. James Sanders, the author of Celluloid Skyline and co-author of PBS’s New York documentary series wrote the correlating script and journalist John Hockenberry narrates the stories.

To achieve the high level of detail desired in the wooden model, Strausfeld worked with a fabricator to produce the model that is eleven feet long by nine feet wide and contains over 250 individual buildings. Due to its size, the model was divided into three separate sections so the Center can easily reconfigure its space for special events. Using Macromedia Flash, Strausfeld also developed a content management system, so Wall Street Rising can quickly update the model’s information about current developments and special events.

Project team: Lisa Strausfeld, Creative Director; Nina Boesch, Designer and Programmer; Kate Wolf, Project Coordinator; Leslie Kang, Production Coordinator.