Alum Matthew Pugh on Building Immersive Experiences and Interactive Technologies

Matthew Pugh (B.Arch ’16) is an architectural designer fascinated by interactive technologies. Where most experiences happen in static, inert spaces, his work brings rooms to life with responsive environments, immersive experiences, and interactive technologies.

At SCI-Arc, Pugh first studied digital and parametric design, which garnered him the Blythe and Thom Mayne Thesis Prize. His work at MAD is also featured in the Pompidou’s permanent collection. At firms such as MAD Architects in Beijing, working on projects like the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Pugh witnessed first-hand how digital design can create more immersive and elegant spaces.

Recently, Pugh has explored alternative ways to think about computational design in the built environment: What if computers weren’t just a design tool, but also a material you interacted with in a building? He pivoted his digital design skillset towards new fields of human-building interaction and responsive environments. Studying this emerging field at Harvard GSD, his thesis research imagined computer-laden “smart environments” (smart homes, smart offices, smart cities) that come to life—reshaping and responding to their occupants in playful, interactive ways. His research on smart building interaction design won Harvard GSD’s Digital Design prize.

Today, Pugh designs and builds immersive experiences and responsive art installations across the globe. For Tokyo art collective teamLab, he played a key role in designing and delivering a 170k sq.ft. art museum located in Abu Dhabi, filled with responsive, interactive art exhibits. He now works for Hyperspace, a cutting-edge immersive experience startup operating out of Dubai. At Hyperspace, Matt helps invent and build beautiful, surreal experiences tied to digital lifestyles and interactive tech. He recently helped design and build House of Hype, a first-of-its-kind 55k sq.ft. experience park in Riyadh that remixes American “hype culture” with immersive technologies. He’s currently helping deliver House of Hype’s 110k sq.ft. big brother in Dubai and is designing a range of other immersive experiences in the entertainment sector and beyond.

We had the pleasure of speaking with Matthew who relayed his academic and professional journey from SCI-Arc to Harvard and from the digital space to interactive, physical installations.

What first attracted you to studying in the B.Arch program at SCI-Arc? 


I actually transferred to SCI-Arc after my first year of school. I had been studying at a more traditional architecture school, and started running into some of the weird, wild, and really experimental work from SCI-Arc online. It was this experimental attitude towards architecture design, something that was so different than anything I’d seen before, that really appealed to me: SCI-Arc felt like a place where you weren’t just learning how to practice design, but also how to rethink and reinvent design practice.

Eventually, I got the chance to visit the SCI-Arc campus (which I’d really recommend anyone interested in the school does!). I remember visiting right before SCI-Arc’s graduate thesis—the students I saw were all working on really unique, individual, personal projects, but were at the same time so eager to help each other out, give each other feedback, collaborate, and learn from and with each other. Once I’d seen first-hand SCI-Arc's studio culture, which felt all about collaboration and shared invention, I knew right away that I wanted to be a part of that.

How have you brought your specific perspectives and skills you developed during your undergraduate studies into your graduate studies at Harvard and your subsequent practice/career? 


Looking back, SCI-Arc really did prepare me well for both my graduate studies at Harvard and for my early career as a designer. There’s a common stereotype for SCI-Arc grads going something like: “oh you went to SCI-Arc, you must be really, really good at a lot of different softwares.” There might be a tiny bit of truth to that, but I really think that more than software skills, the most valuable part of my SCI-Arc education was the way it prepared me to think creatively about design research. At SCI-Arc, programs like the vertical studios and thesis program train you to think creatively about using (or even intentionally mis-using) different building types, different tools, and different technologies in a really inventive way.

These design research skills were so, so valuable during my graduate thesis research at Harvard—I was studying different ways to make “smart buildings'' more immersive, more experiential, and more useful, and I found I could draw a lot from the kind of design research workflows I’d picked up in SCI-Arc vertical studios. I found the skillset from SCI-Arc verticals was immensely helpful when translating my traditional paper + text-based research into a really unique body of design research.

The design research skills I first developed at SCI-Arc have also been so valuable in my professional career. Today I work on different kinds of digitally immersive artworks, immersive installations, and immersive experiences—these are spaces that, a lot of the time, don’t really have a direct precedent or reference to build off of. SCI-Arc really prepared me to think creatively about what might happen in these kinds of digitally interactive spaces and how we might invent and build more digitally-immersive experiences.

Your installation work is so impressive and immersive! How did you find your visual and technical language and how have these been incorporated into your projects with teamLab and Hyperspace?

For the past few years, my design work has thought about different ways digital technology might change the way we interact with our spaces. I’ve always thought the smart building industry was a really interesting sector, but so much of it is driven by really dry, efficiency-driven motivations (how to make a building use less energy, how to put more tenants in a building, etc.) And the ways people usually interact with a “smart space” or “smart building” aren’t really spatial at all—you interact with a smart building through dashboards, touch screens, and web portals. What I really love about the work I’ve been doing at TeamLab and Hyperspace is that they take these interactions with digitized spaces off the screen, and make them spatial, immersive, and experiential. These are spaces that come to life with interactive tech; You don’t just occupy them, you interact with them in really fun, playful, beautiful ways.

In terms of the technical language involved in this type of work, designing and building these kinds of interactions really requires some creative technology hacking, which I definitely picked up from my time at SCI-Arc! I remember at SCI-Arc we would do all sorts of strange things, like use an animation software to test how people might move through a building or use a 6-axis robot to make an impressionistic architectural painting. In my work, we need to intentionally mis-use different softwares like this all the time—for example at Harvard GSD, researching different ways to have a more responsive bedroom I would use software like Unity (a video game development software) to test out different smart home data collection and interactions—things like modulating the color of the smart lamp in my room or track how active I was at my desk. This happens all the time in my professional work, too: For example, in a recent project I was designing an art installation where water is pumped into a huge, projection-mapped topographic garden, using grasshopper to test how water would fill up a topographic space and interact with our projected artwork. I’m pretty sure Grasshopper was never designed to simulate hundreds of thousands of liters of water pumping into a topographic space, and Unity wasn’t probably made to design smart-home interfaces, but my time at SCI-Arc really gave me the confidence to repurpose different digital tools in a creative way.

What was most impactful about your life as a student at SCI-Arc? How have your studies at SCI-Arc influenced your practice?

One unexpected impact from SCI-Arc is I feel SCI-Arc’s studio culture is great at training you to work collaboratively and creatively with a really diverse group of designers.

In my work today, I’ll work not only with architects and interior designers, but also graphic designers, software engineers, motion graphic artists, artisans, craftsmen, and so many other flavors of design professionals. I love this about my work, it’s so interesting to see the way different design backgrounds approach a similar problem from totally different angles.

SCI-Arc studios really prepared me to work this way: While everyone in the studio at SCI-Arc is training to be an architect, it’s such a diverse group of people both in terms of their backgrounds and perspectives, and in their interests as architects. Students at SCI-Arc love to check in on each other’s work, give each other advice, ask each other for desk crits, and hear different viewpoints from each other. Today, this exact same skill is really invaluable to me—I really benefit a lot learning from co-workers from totally different design backgrounds. SCI-Arc is really a great place to learn how to work with and learn from designers around you, and the SCI-Arc studio vibe is definitely something I’ve tried to bring with me to every design firm I’ve worked in!

What have you valued most in the transition from your time as an undergraduate student into the professional world? What elements have you been most surprised by?

Two things I hadn’t expected: first, I’m amazed just how diverse an architectural education can be! A SCI-Arc education is, of course, super valuable if you want to practice architecture, especially concept and schematic design. I did exactly the same at the start of my career—working on really beautiful and unique schematic design for big, cultural projects like museums. But as my career has evolved, I’ve had to deliver so many other things than architectural design documentation: I’ve had to deliver code, be a craftsman and woodworker, do business strategy for a startup, be a strategic design consultant for local governments, work in an art collaborative, manage a construction site—all sorts of different things! My classmates have ended up in even wilder places: today, many are architects, but some are professors, hoteliers, tattoo artists, property developers, motion graphics artists, set photographers, social justice advocates: so many different things!

I think this is something really beautiful about a design education; you’re really learning a specific attitude towards problem solving that can be applied to so many different problems, even things you can’t even imagine working on when you’re in school.

How do you see yourself moving forward with your practice as you develop House of Hype and beyond, what themes and projects are you hoping to pursue?

Right now, our startup has two main “brands” of immersive experience we’ve been building: AYA and House of Hype.

House of Hype is all about bringing digital experiences and online culture to a physical environment: This is an entertainment destination where you create your own social media content, where exploring the park is gamified and “played” like a videogame, and where internet culture is materialized IRL. If HoH is all about connecting physical and digital lifestyles, AYA is kind of the opposite: AYA is all about creating a really ephemeral, hallucinogenic, surreal experience that’s haptically something you could never experience in a digital world—something so shockingly different and immersive that you drop your phone and your jaw at once.

Our company has learned so much designing these two parks—AYA has been open for more than a year now, we’re about to finish our second HoH, and there’s more on the way. What I’m really excited about, though, is thinking about other types of projects and industries outside of the arts and entertainment sector where we could start applying the same types of experiences. We’re already working on a couple other building types we think could leverage our immersive experiences. I wish I could share them now, but they’re still under wraps—you’ll have to just keep an eye on Hyperspace’s work and see soon!

I’m really looking forward to these new projects, where we’re looking to bring immersive experiences beyond—these are where the “smart building” and “responsive environment” could really become something new and engaging, and where these types of technologies could start to have a massive impact on the way we occupy and interact with certain types of buildings and spaces.

What advice or thoughts would you share with those interested in pursuing an architecture education at SCI-Arc?

So many things! I’ll give three:

First, look into the different professors at SCI-Arc! These are some of the best design researchers in their specific architectural niche, and they all have really distinct projects. SCI-Arc is such a special opportunity to help these professors with their design research contributions to the field and learn how they think about design. Take advantage of this! Watch their lectures online and pick which you want to learn from, because they all have really unique, distinct approaches to design practice.

Second, once you’re at SCI-Arc: At SCI-Arc people sometimes say, “your thesis is the first project of your architectural career;” There’s definitely a lot of pressure to discover your “life project” as an architect. While that was definitely the case for some of my classmates, it wasn’t for me—and SCI-Arc was still such a valuable experience! To be honest, I’m not sure that as an undergraduate student I could have ever imagined the type of design work I’m doing now, but the core design mindset I developed at SCI-Arc is something I use every single day, and really made my career as a designer possible.

Lastly, after SCI-Arc: Keep in touch with your classmates! All my classmates have gone off to do such a wild range of different things, and I’ve really gotten a lot out of hearing about their career paths and keeping in touch. But for every former SCI-Arc classmate to keep in touch with, there must be 2 more where I see their work online and think “wow that’s crazy! I wish I had kept up with what they’re doing.” I love hearing about all the different design careers my former classmates have gone on. I've been making more effort to catch up with more of them lately, but I wish I’d started sooner!