Expo 2025: Australia
Project Concept
In Australia’s pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, the experience culminates in the building of a songline. Songlines are an important part of Aboriginal Australian culture: pathways across the country’s land turned into song, combining navigational information and cultural knowledge into a form that can be recited and passed down through generations.
This experience allows visitors to create their own version of a songline: an abstracted map of the landmarks they have visited and paths they have walked within Australia’s pavilion, built through the oral storytelling of their experience.
Process
After initial research on Australia, including past expos, nature/biome/landscape, sustainability efforts, arts & culture, inventions/innovations, and indigenous Australian history, the songline emerged as a unique and central theme. Then interaction ideas and spatial experience development began.
Rhino and Unity were used for spatial development, including exploring scale, navigation, and moments of interaction. The visual language was inspired by Aboriginal art and input into Unity for interaction prototyping.
The handheld device that triggers interactions and stores information for later use in the participatory experience was prototyped at various levels of fidelity. Arduino was used to add functionality.
The experience was prototyped at full scale in the Spatial Experiences Lab.
Project website: https://medium.com/@ahwen_10732/expo-2025-581113fac6d9