In today's excessively diverse and pervasive media, are we still able to imagine the world and experience enchantment as children or ancient people did? This project explores how ancestral ways of storytelling provoke our imagination, how they become a platform for re-enchantment. Formally it involves participatory design, type design and motion design. It is also a literature experiment — a poem, created by collective imagination, forms an architecture of poem with no fixed ways of reading it, in a 3D space.
26 participants provided their imagination of the Hanging Garden of Babylon. The Hanging Garden was chosen because it is a mythical architecture that has no archeological evidence, exists only in historical documents, and has been given contemporary meanings. The designer sat down with the participants, recited the story of the Hanging Garden face to face, asked them to draw their imaginations, and created a zine displaying their drawings. Based on a mixture of the imaginations, the designer then created a three-dimensional virtual space, in which the texts displayed were derived from the participants' descriptions of emotions and actions triggered by their own imaginations and used a script-based mono-linear typeface customized for this project for the bone structure of the model. The final visual outcome — Searching, shows the process of searching words that represent emotions or actions in this information architecture.