Summary: Screens fight for seconds of attention, spaces get minutes. Experience design uses that - with installations that treat body movement, not clicks, as input. The rules - instantly understandable, socially contagious, technically invisible.
The average glance at a billboard lasts under two seconds. The average dwell time at a well-made interactive installation is several minutes. The argument for experience design lies between those two numbers.
What experience design is
Experience design shapes experiences rather than surfaces. In the narrower sense in which we practice it at Luftschloss: interactive installations in physical space – media facades, walk-in brand spaces, trade show installations, shop windows that respond. The tools are AI, CGI, real-time rendering, LED technology, and sensors. The material is human curiosity.
The term is often used more broadly – some mean by it any form of user experience, from app onboarding to a hotel lobby. Our distinction is pragmatic: experience design begins where the space itself becomes the medium. Not a screen in the room, but the room as interface.
Why the space beats the screen
- Attention is present, not fought for: whoever stands in front of an installation has already decided to look. On a smartphone, every message competes with everything else.
- The body is the interface: gestures, movement, position in space – interaction with no learning curve, because everyone already knows how.
- Experiences are social: people show each other what they've discovered. A good installation never plays only to the person in front of it, but to the twenty behind them.
- Memory forms physically: what you've done stays longer than what you've seen.
This shift is also why classic outdoor advertising is changing right now: digital-out-of-home surfaces are turning from playback stations into experience venues. Why I believe a category of its own is emerging from this, I've described under the heading from DOOH to IOOH.
An example: the PZ Nova media facade
What this looks like in practice is shown by our largest project so far: PZ Nova, an interactive media facade in the heart of Pforzheim, created in partnership with the Pforzheimer Zeitung and awarded the German Customer Award 2026. Passersby control the facade with their movements – no app, no instructions, no touch. The technology behind it is elaborate: sensors capture movement in the urban space, our own motion tracking software translates it into image responses in real time. But none of that is visible. All that's visible is: the wall responds to me.
What this project taught me most: the hurdle isn't technical, it's social. People have to dare to interact with a wall in public space. The installation has to invite them, not test them. I've written up how PZ Nova came about behind the scenes separately.
Three principles for installations that work
From our projects – from the immersive shop window in downtown Pforzheim to the PZ Nova media facade – three rules have been distilled:
- The three-second rule: what the installation can do must be recognizable without explanation. In public space, nobody reads instructions.
- Reward before message: the sense of success first, then the brand. Whoever broadcasts first loses the player.
- Make the technology invisible: sensors, cameras, computing power – all of it disappears behind the experience. Visible technology creates distance; invisible technology creates magic.
Behind each of these rules is the same thought: an installation in public space gets no second chance. An app is allowed to make a bad first impression and explain itself on the second launch. A facade, a shop window, a trade show booth has exactly one moment – the one in which someone walks past.
How to plan an experience project
The process differs markedly from classic digital projects. At the start there isn't a concept but a place: who walks past here, in what mood, with how much time? A station concourse calls for different experiences than a trade show hall or a shopping street on a Saturday. Then comes the experience before the technology: we prototype the interaction roughly first – often a projector and a sensor are enough – before we talk about final hardware. And finally continuous operation: an installation meant to run for months needs remote maintenance, automatic restarts, and content that can be updated without a technician traveling out.
Interactive experiences don't have to start at room scale, either: the same principles apply a size smaller to interactive product presentations in the showroom or at a trade show – often the better entry point for brands that want to test the format first.
Conclusion
Experience design isn't a gimmick for trade shows but the answer to a structural problem: digital channels are overcrowded, physical spaces are not. Brands that understand spaces as interfaces communicate where attention is still real – and they communicate through the most powerful medium there is: one's own experience.