At the heart of the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is the Emerging Issues Commons, a dynamic interactive installation focused on public policy where visitors come to learn, collaborate, and take action.
At the heart of the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is the Emerging Issues Commons, a dynamic interactive installation focused on public policy where visitors come to learn, collaborate, and take action.
In conjunction with the Institute for Emerging Issues, Second Story worked to create a platform that enables and inspires civic engagement, putting the tools of public policy into everyone’s hands. The result is a suite of interactives that shares the narrative of North Carolina, focusing on the core issues of Economy, Education, Environments, and Health. More than just a physical installation, the Commons is an invitation to participate, an experience with democracy woven into its DNA.
As visitors navigate the space, they explore data-driven interactives, personal stories, and social media integration, all orchestrated to tell the larger story at hand: the story of North Carolina. The “Pulse,” the cascading ribbon sculpture at the center of the room, broadcasts a streaming flow of news, tweets, and statistics. Interactive stations throughout the Commons, including a 16-foot interactive wall that reacts to a visitor’s presence, display salient statistics and data, educating citizens so they can make better-informed decisions. As a complement to the numbers-focused interactives, a series of personality-driven videos offer the flipside of the data: the voices of everyday North Carolinians sharing stories about their state in their own words.
On the web, the Commons website brings it all together for a broader audience, allowing people from all over the state to participate and enabling a global audience to learn about North Carolina. An intuitive, comprehensive content management system provides a tool to create and manage content, putting the power into the hands of the Institute.