Lighting designer Michael Stiller of Michael Stiller Design is slated to present a session at LDI 2024: Breaking Rectangles (Let Your Digital Dreams Flee the Screen), in which he will examine the way a number of award-winning projects have created a true immersivity in environments ranging from indoor experience centers to exterior, city-scaled developments. His session is part of a focus on architectural lighting at LDI 2024, including a new pavilion for products on the show floor. Live Design chats with Stiller about his career, his session, his love of pixels, and his penchant for teaching,
LD: When did you form Michael Stiller Design and how large is the firm?
MS: I founded Michael Stiller Design in 1998 as a solo venture and worked on my own at first, with freelance assistants for larger projects. Since then I have grown the MSD practice into a small group consisting of two regular designers, in addition to myself, and a small stable of freelancers we take on for on-site implementation, media design, and programming work.
LD: What are some of your most recent projects and what makes them notable?
MS: The Verizon at The Hub on Causeway is an interactive, media driven lobby experience and animated building crown that is a prominent addition to the Boston skyline.
The Accenture Innovation Center (images below) is an interactive lighting experience where we provided our first in-house generative media-to-light program. Users can select up to three color points, via a wall-mounted GUI color picker, that are rendered into a bespoke digital art piece routed to medium resolution screens and simultaneously projected onto the ceiling via an array of RGBW uplights.
Current projects include a massive resort complex where, as part of our ongoing collaboration with Woodroffe Bassett Design of the UK, we are providing exterior facade and landscape lighting for a large hotel and entertainment tower, along with site lighting for much of the developing Al Maran Island in Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates.
LD: How do you stay up to date on all the new technology in the lighting market?
MS: We live and work in or near New York City, so in addition to attending trade shows we have access to smaller, road-show demo events hosted by many manufacturers. And we are lucky to have direct relationships with many of them and can ask for private demos and, occasionally, samples to review for inclusion in a particular project.
LD: What design software or interesting apps you use?
MS: Revit, Vectorworks, Adobe Suite, TouchDesigner, After Effects, and our own specifications package manager for architectural and permanent installation projects: Specifications PackMan.
LD: Tell us about Breaking Rectangles (Let Your Digital Dreams Flee the Screen), your session at LDI, and about your interest in teaching?
MS: Well, it turns out I like to talk about light. And it’s always been a bit frustrating providing a creative service in a medium that has physical properties to physical designers and spatial creators who might have a minimal understanding as to how their primary design choices effect our ability to create the kinds of lighting effects they—or we—want to achieve. So, about 15 years ago, when the opportunity to teach a lighting design class as part of FIT’s graduate program in Exhibit and Experience Design presented itself, I jumped at the chance to educate my future clients to be better collaborators with the lighting designers they are sure to work with in the future. And who knows, maybe some will be so taken with the craft they will decide to become lighting designers themselves.
Why breaking rectangles? My history, that of an experimental film and video maker with an abiding interest in lighting, set me up to pursue projects that combine digital art and lighting design. Following the advent of RGB LED lighting, when the first products by Element Labs—the Versatube and Versatile—came out, the technology spoke to me. Here were a group of product designers that were making “lights" designed to be controlled by media—essentially big pixels. A whole world of creative tools could be imagined that exploded media art out from the confines of the ubiquitous rectangular screens that were beginning to litter our public and private spaces. And the fact that this technology lent itself to abstract visual expressions, and was less hospitable to the logos and more literal branding our clients would inevitably ask us to project, made it even more appealing.
LD: You are a member of the frame:work community — can you talk about that a little?
MS: I am a member of the frame:work community because my work involves the exploitation of pixels, in my case to create an experience and identity comprised of moving illumination for buildings and physical spaces. But I am a bit of an adjunct to this group, who are primarily digital artists working with very high resolution canvasses to create complex and virtual worlds that are more or less literal in their narrative intent. For the most part the community has been harnessing more and more, smaller and smaller pixels for an ultra-high-res experience whereas my work is based on a technology that best lends itself to a big pixel, low resolution approach. Where they might work with millions of pixels, in an AR space or XR volume, I am working with displays comprised of architectural lighting that is very low-res in nature and fragmented: confined to specific architectural elements like pilasters, columns, and maybe a roofline. What’s fun for me is to take these non-contiguous surfaces and figure out how to use media to tell a cohesive story. My "displays” are by nature exploded and full of negative space that the media needs to flow across, invisibly, until it reaches it’s next “window,” whether that be a direct-view detail on a vertical architectural element or an indirect cove light that is illuminating a part of a tray ceiling.
LD: What advice would you give young designers getting into the business today?
MS: Find the people who are doing the work that excites you and figure out how to get with them and be a part of their community. Joining professional organizations like frame:work, the Themed Entertainment Association, or the Designers Lighting Forum, and attending conferences, like LDI, is a great way to meet people in your chosen field and, especially in today’s world of online job boards, it’s a good way to make a personal connection and find like-minded practitioners. Most of these organizations have reduced rates for students and next-gen members of the field.