Wishing Cloud

San Francisco CA | Installation 

2017

Gallery | Details
Woman and two children laying down in the net Wishing Cloud enclosure looking at the balloons.

The netting provided a perfect airy perch for watching the growing cloud of balloons shift and jostle in the wind.

Image Credit
David Baker Architects
A one-day installation, the Wishing Cloud offered the public a playful space to express a wish and add it to a collective expression of dreams and aspirations for the future.

For PARK(ing) Day 2017, SFMOMA invited us to design a temporary installation in tandem with their PlaySFMOMA initiative.

Along with fellow design firms Box Clever, Surface Design and Envelope A+D, we were tasked with transforming the row of parking spaces at the museum’s Howard Street entrance into a place for conversation, curiosity and, of course, play.

DBA_Lab—our in-house research and experimentation studio—takes on small-scale creative projects that help us test theories of prototyping, new materials, responsive design, and improvisation. The scale, time frame, and spirit of the challenge proposed by SFMOMA was a perfect fit for DBA_Lab

Our simple scaffold and netting structure provided a suspended net to support the wisher in contemplation, and surrounding nets to catch the wishes—notes tied to buoyant balloons—and gather them together in a “wishing cloud.”