I’m optimistic that interior designers will embrace large-format, direct-view LED display walls as a fundamental new tool in their architectural placemaking.

I don’t say that lightly: For countless years, interior designers have adamantly tried to hide any digital displays that might intrude on their design aesthetic. From living rooms to kitchens to master bedrooms, endless mechanical gadgets and specialty furniture pieces have been developed for concealing TVs and flat-panel displays. Woe is the designer that lets any device with a digital screen desecrate the project photography for the glossy magazines.

So the thought that an entire architectural surface will become a magical digital display is a dramatic reversal and an enormous leap for designers in both creative concept and project execution.

Yet once designers get past their antiquated rejection of all things technology, they will discover that the new worlds of creativity offered by large-format LED display walls will amplify their design ambitions in many new and wonderful ways.

That transformation will be driven by three creative opportunities:

CYCLES OF TIME

Light is fundamentally dynamic. So when once stagnant architectural surfaces emit light, the dynamic element of time suddenly becomes as integral to that surface as color or texture.

Designers can now plot cycles & scales of time in their projects and how the feeling and atmosphere of that space dynamically changes.

For example, maybe a client wants to wake up and do their yoga overlooking a vista of a sunny forest. Maybe that client needs to work from home during the day and wants to feel like they are looking out the window of a skyscraper. And maybe the client wants to unwind at the end of the day with a romantic nighttime view of a fantasy cityscape as they cook.

Interior designers can now design dynamic interior effects at the scale of a day, a week, a season, holiday calendars, school calendars – whatever scale of time is appropriate.

LAYERS OF REALITY

Architectural-scale LED displays are becoming stunningly realistic: Pixel pitches are approaching the absolute perception of the human eye; frame rates, bit depths, color reproduction and black levels accurately replicate reality; and content generation is live, instantaneous and cheap thanks to technologies such as live rendering and AI.

If all that techno-babble is too much, let’s keep it simple: The line between the “real world” and the “virtual world” is poised to blend. Our architectural surfaces will become seamless portals to the virtual world.

In the end, a human has their visual experience of the world: Color is wavelengths of light entering our pupils. Texture is our perception of shadows. Light is always additive. Combine the stunning technological advances of LED display walls with timeless artistic techniques such as forced perspective, trompe-l’oeil effects and the artistic potential transforms at architectural scale.

Architectural placemaking is only limited by the imagination of the designer: How about animated tessellating patterns that subtly change over time, like a new form of wallpaper? Textures that recede in or out, morphing slowly over days? Sweeping views of nature? Or sweeping views of fictional, whimsical fantasy scenes? Or abstracted layers of data feeds for ambient communications?

We’re just scratching the surface. Designers have a new world of creative concepts awaiting them when they start to widen that space that exists between realities.

LARGE FORMAT ART

Interior designers often select objects of art to enrich a space and complement their design concepts. But the art most often is simply objectified, standalone pieces – not intrinsic to the architecture of the place.

Art becomes transcendent when it reaches an architectural scale. Imagine Guernica by Picasso or the massive breadth of Jackson Pollock’s works.

Art becomes especially vivid when rendered with the spectacular levels of brightness and saturation that LED displays can provide. LED displays are effectively a new medium, a new form of canvas with unprecedented visual qualities for artists to explore and exploit. New artistic trends such a large-scale street art pieces will be turbo-charged on LED walls.

Digital surfaces now enable interior designers to select vibrant still compositions or fluid motion-based art pieces. Imagine popular works such those by Rafik Anadol and other leading motion graphics artists. Key qualitative factors of the art – the rate of the motion, the rate of morphing, the brightness levels, color and saturation, etc. – have a heavy impact on the character of the space. Designers must choose the digital media content and dial in the digital characteristics as carefully as they pick paint, fabric and tile swatches for their presentation boards. They can’t abdicate responsibility for the “A/V stuff” to other consultants and media artists without giving up fundamental creative control for what is increasingly becoming the largest portion of interior projects.

A NEW WORLD OF CREATIVE SERVICE OFFERINGS

New technologies such a microLED displays in architectural tile formats open up entire new possibilities for interior designers and architects to expand their service offerings.

No longer do designers need to conceive of their spaces as stagnant lumps of building materials passively bathed in light; no longer are they limited to dimmer switches and window curtains as their only tools to dynamically change the character of a space. The surface qualities constituting that space are now limited only by their imaginations. And those spaces can continuously evolve over time.

These come together to present fantastic new service opportunities for those designers that embrace digital surfaces as integral to their practice, not merely an A/V system they hope is somehow hidden away.

Design of content will be integral to interior designers. The ability to dynamically refresh content and adjust parametric effect generators opens up new reasons to revisit their clients on a more regular basis.

In the end, the same fundamental skills that interior designers pride themselves on are invaluable regardless if the wall is painted gypboard or tiled microLED. Developing and adding in new craft skills such as the conceptualization and implementation of cycles of time, layers of reality and new types of large format art sounds like quite the bright future.