“Story Wall” Takes Shape in the MIT Welcome Center
If you’ve been in E38 lately, you may have noticed a new installation made up of individually stained wood panels in an abstraction of the MIT campus as seen from overhead. This project was completed by Midnight Mansion, an experiential design firm led by MIT alumni and founded by Victor Hung ’14, a 2.009 instructor, the creator of Next Haunt and Next Big Thing, and longtime admissions office creative collaborator.
Midnight Mansion and the Admissions + SFS communications team have met since last September to develop a physical infrastructure and design framework to enable a long-awaited a content strategy initially developed in 2021, shortly after admissions moved into the Welcome Center. Drawing upon extensive qualitative research and human-centered design exercises with current and prospective students, the goal of the “Story Wall” is to highlight Institute-wide responses to large-scale interdisciplinary challenges like climate change, public health, and the future of work.
By featuring people and projects from across all levels of the Institute, the Story Wall will show — rather than tell — full range of MIT, from student clubs, to classes, to labs, to spinout companies, here in Cambridge and around the world. This will communicate to our visitors that if they aspire to be part of a broader community that takes bold steps to tackle important problems together, they will find like minds (and hearts) at MIT.
Our plan is that the content on the story wall will change infrequently but regularly — perhaps every year or two, at the pace of a good museum installation. At present, the communications team is fully deployed to other priorities (most importantly, initiatives to continue to broaden access to MIT in the wake of the Supreme Court’s SFFA decision last year). Until we’ve freed up capacity, we all can enjoy a nice piece of “passive artwork” that embodies the analytic (abstract geometries) and embodied (Cambridge/Charles location) elements of campus.
— Chris Peterson SM ’13, Admissions Office