University of Oregon Alumni Center
The Cheryl Ramberg Ford & Allyn Ford Alumni Center will soon become the dynamic new point of entry to the University of Oregon campus where alumni reconnect, where visitors are welcomed, and prospective students will congregate before their campus tours.
Staircases cascade through a vaulted atrium and flow into the Interpretive Center where the diverse “story streams” that define the Oregon experience converge in grand interactive installations. Here visitors will explore and experience the heritage, culture, and vitality of UO in a flexible, inviting environment where stories are told, information is served, and alumni are celebrated.
As an architectural focus in the center of the atrium, the interactive Alumni Table will be a persistent reminder of the building’s purpose: to serve, celebrate, and cultivate past, present, and future alumni. Over 200,000 alumni flow through its interactive surface displaying details about individual alumni such as graduating class and major. Nine towering floor-to-ceiling “Cascade Panels” will slide on a track system through the length of the interpretive center. Several panels serve dynamic media revealing academics, athletics, and student life while others provide real-time data visualizations and campus wayfinding. Groups can congregate around the panels to watch them play out or individuals can touch and interact with the surfaces directly. Visitors will discover campus events, building-specific information, and the names of alumni whose generosity helps fuel the vitality of the University in a large entry wall where electronics are hidden below its wooden surface.
Press & Awards
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“The Electric Storytellers,” ''Oregon Quarterly', Mindy Moreland, December 2009
“Second Story has been designing such award-winning displays and interactive media stations for fifteen years for such high-profile clients as the recording industry’s Grammy Museum and the Walt Disney Company. Now they’re dreaming up a totally new way to tell and retell the University of Oregon’s story...Second Story hopes that the interpretive center they ultimately create will not only provide a warm “welcome home” to visiting alumni, but will also help to introduce future Ducks to a University that will shape and be shaped by them. “To think that this will become a more effective way to recruit for new students,” Johnson says, “that’s really exciting.””