In a time of advanced and pervasive communications, brands and corporations are struggling to find and engage with their consumers. Channels have fragmented. Audiences are scattered everywhere. Still, companies are constantly looking to effectively impact people.

There is still a place where you are sure to connect with consumers, where you can use interactivity to create surprise and engage in a totally new relationship with people. No, it’s not the Web. It’s at the store, dummy.

The store is the place where you have the best shot of really going for it, connect with your audience using all their senses (or most), using a set of tools that would be unmatched in any other place. This, for example, is what we have done in Porto, together with TMN. This what how we perceive interactivity: as a means to create experiences that are really remarkable. Because they are real.

*or at the Showroom, or at your Headquarters, or at your Company’s Museum, or at… you get it now.

Outside the Expo proper, next to one of the entrances, was the brilliant Digital Water Pavillion (DWP). Part of a future technological park project called Milla Digital (designed by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning), the DWT showcased an array of interactive water curtains.

By means of asking the pavilion’s staff, you could have a word of your choice appear written in the curtains.

Specially at night, when lighting played a big role, the effect was very unexpected, seamless and poetic (except for the “slippery when wet” yellow signs). Video here.

Find the complete credits here.

The Sub-Saharan Africa pavilion, actually an entire building that housed several countries, put on an impressive out-door show, everyday.

The entire outside wall was covered by a mosaic of 15cm square plaques. These pieces were decorated with translucent silvery vinyl and were hung from the top, as if sequins, so that they would sway with the wind creating a very convincing, and soothing, building-sized water rippling effect.

At night, though, the thing would burst into light and serve as a gigantic screen, in which the plaques acted as black-and-white pixels, each powered by a set of 4 white LEDs. Of course images could only be perceived from a relatively large distance and had a CGA-comparable pixel resolution.

Content featured a long and exciting sequence of animations and real video, intended to pass some water-related awareness message, according to those who designed it.

(Allow me to say that in front of a sun-bright thousand LEDs, environmental awareness -or any kind of awareness, for that matter- isn’t the first thing that pops into your mind. Nothing really pops into your mind. You just feel amazed, kind of happy, physically overwhelmed, and for those in the mood, a pure technological bliss.)

Video here.

Apparently, design and concept (not sure about technology) were the works of German Atelier Brueckner. Project and construction from Swiss Nussli. Both with powerful portfolios.