From Villa Borghese's 'Tales of Light' to immersive design: where light, space and narrative come together
Imagine you walk into a square. It is dark. The façade of an old building is still, silent, but in a few moments it is transformed into a living canvas: lights streaming, architecture coming alive, stories unfolding like film. This is not a futuristic dream, but videomapping or project mapping, one of the most spectacular trends in the art of experience design.
"Tales of Light", on stage from 11 July to 11 October in Rome, at the Borghese Gallery, is one of the latest examples. A tale of lights, accompanied by an original soundtrack, will retrace the museum's history, in a visual unfolding projected onto the back of the villa, visible from the gardens.
In fact, it is a very popular technique and has been used, since the early 2000s, to catch the public's attention, for example for marketing purposes. Between 2015 and 2016, for example, the capital hosted an entire festival dedicated to videomapping, the Romap Festival. There are hundreds of memorable examples from around the world: NBA star Carmelo Anthony running and scoring on the Hudson River, Chevalier's Origine du Monde projected in the churchyard of the Sacré Cœur in Casablanca, the permanent Borderless World at the Mori Digital Museum in Tokyo, the Festival of Lights in Berlin.
The first projections
Some even trace its conceptual origins back to the Chinese shadows of the Han dynasty, but in terms of technology, we are talking about a technique that took its first steps in the 1960s and 1970s, with its first famous commercial use in the Disneyland Haunted Housethe very first in 1969 in the Californian park. This was before the advent of the digital technologywhich heralded its definitive boom after the 1990s.
All this fits into the broader context of experiential design, the result of a change of perspective: designing not for an object, but for an emotion. In this scenario, videomapping becomes a powerful tool. It is not just a projection technique on irregular surfaces, but a real narrative languagecapable of transforming space into narrative. The wall is no longer a limit, but a channel. Light is not just aesthetics, but memory, suggestion.
Whether it is an event, a museum installation or a commercial experience, experiential design and videomapping work together to create immersive, multi-sensory, deeply memorable environments.
Where does the design end and the magic begin?
The line is thin, but precise, ending where the viewer stops looking and starts feeling. That is where experiential design makes its entrance. Integrating disciplines - graphics, set design, technology, storytelling - means putting the audience at the centre, designing not for them, but around them. The design becomes directionthe designer an invisible conductor working between emotions, colours and rhythm.
Videomapping, in this sense, is just one of the possibilities. It is where the visual meets time, sound and three-dimensionality. It is a means of suspending disbelief like at the cinema, but live.
For those training in design today, these new forms of expression are not an extra, they are necessities of everyday practice. Because contemporary design seeks connections, builds experiences, awakens wonder. In other words, design today is not just what you see, but what stays with you even after the lights have gone out.
