Every two years, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) invites regional design teams to develop ideas with a level of creative freedom not typically experienced in their day-to-day design work. This year, we once again had the pleasure of creating the marketing materials for Design MMoCA as well as developing a featured installation.

Since each design team must use a work of art from the museum’s permanent collection as their inspiration, we began by spending some time with the museum’s curators. We ultimately chose Imperfect Circle #2, a screenprint by the artist Robert Mangold.

Captivated by the way a simple shift in the everyday can reignite the imagination, we found inspiration for the event’s theme: BRK TH PTTRN. Everything from posters to programs were crafted around this idea.

BRK TH PTTRN also became the foundation for our Design MMoCA installation—a digital design experience that explored how changes to our routines can make art come alive. Using WebGL and Google Chrome, we loaded a webcam feed into the web browser to displace a larger-than-life pattern of lines projected onto the museum’s wall.

Visitors were invited to interact with the exhibit and see how they too could break the pattern with simple shifts of their own. Have a look: