By Ben Dreith

US-based designer Behnaz Farahi and the Critical Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab have projected sounds and video of the ocean alongside crowd-sourced messages into a public square for the university's inaugural Future Fest symposium.

Called Ocean of Dreams, the installation was projected from the top of the MIT Museum down onto Kendall Plaza, a central square for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Farahi, who leads MIT Media Lab's Critical Matter Group, mounted two Panasonic 30,000-lumen laser projectors and loaded an aerial view of the tides coming in and out for a hyper-realistic depiction of the ocean.

For Farahi, the installation represented a "way of thinking" beyond simply "designing objects".

"From that perspective, we can also think about designing the future: not predicting it, but actively imagining and shaping the kinds of futures we want to live in," said Farahi.

"For me, design is ultimately a way of asking: what could be otherwise, and how might we help bring that possibility into being. That is also how I think about Ocean of Dreams, as a space for collectively imagining and designing possible futures."