Bringing Melbourne’s data to life
at city scale
CITY DNA - Visualise | Immerse | Engage
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An emerging technology exhibition for Melbourne Knowledge Week that blended physical and digital media to help people explore Melbourne’s past, present, and possible futures through data.
Services
Experience prototyping
Physical–digital integration
Precision engineering
Fabrication coordination
On-site build support & reliability tuning
Data made tangible
A physical city model used as a canvas for exploring real datasets through projection mapping.
Immersion with meaning
VR/AR and interactive screens designed to make complex ideas legible and engaging.
Participation not spectacle
An exhibition built to deepen public connection to the city and invite conversation about change.
Turning city data into shared understanding.
City DNA reframed data as something you can see, touch, and explore—using emerging tech to make the city’s stories feel immediate and human. The centrepiece was a projection-mapped 3D printed city model, controlled via an iPad interface, bringing spatial data and “live” narratives onto the physical form of Melbourne.
The challenge
City data is abundant—but abstract. The challenge was to translate complex datasets into an experience the public could intuitively navigate, while ensuring the exhibition’s physical components were robust, repeatable, and precise enough to support projection mapping and interaction at scale.
My role
I built the underlying infrastructure that made the city model function reliably in-situ, focusing on precision placement and alignment so the 3D printed blocks located perfectly, supporting accurate projection mapping and interaction during the exhibition run.
What I delivered
Evidence
Spatial / physical constraints mapped into a placement and alignment approach
Installation logic that supported repeatable setup and consistent output
Direction
Infrastructure and handling strategy for the modular 3D city model
Alignment/registration approach to ensure the printed blocks sat exactly where expected
Commitment
On-site build support to ensure the model operated reliably during exhibition use
A physical system capable of supporting an interactive, projection-mapped experience
Scale
Presented as part of Melbourne Knowledge Week
A projection-mapped, 3D-printed city model used to
explore datasets via interaction.
Credits
Exhibition: City of Melbourne / Melbourne Knowledge Week. Physical–digital model infrastructure, precision alignment, and installation support by Thom Luke / Threshold Design.
A high-impact public exhibition that helped people engage with Melbourne’s data in a more intuitive, embodied way, turning maps and datasets into an experience that invited curiosity, conversation, and participation.
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