Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum is one of the largest art museums between Chicago and the West Coast — more than 70,000 works across 12 collections. For the award-winning exhibition Biophilia: Nature Reimagined, the museum needed something no template could provide: a living exhibit piece, built from software.

Working with the exhibition’s curator and interpretive team, we designed and built an interactive data wall:

• iPads mounted in the gallery invited visitors to answer a ten-question survey about their relationship with nature.
• Each submission plotted a dot, live, on a projected visualization wall — a growing constellation of every visitor’s connection-to-nature score, rendered with D3.
• A QR code let visitors take the survey on their own phones, with results emailed to them directly.

Custom-built with D3, PHP, and MySQL, running on gallery iPads and projectors — a web application performing as a work of interpretive art, in front of thousands of museum visitors.

The shadow work: visitors saw their dot join a constellation on a museum wall. Behind it was survey logic, a database, and a real-time visualization pipeline — invisible, as it should be.