655 New York Avenue — Rooftop Garden Signage & AR Experience
category:
Experiential Design
services:
Environmental Graphics, Augmented Reality, Interaction Design
date:
November 22, 2025
As part of the opening of 655 New York Avenue, a rooftop edible garden was created as a shared amenity for the building’s tenant community. Filled with fresh herbs and greens, from mint and rosemary to arugula, the garden invited employees to step outside, harvest ingredients, and bring a small part of the rooftop back to their workplace.
I contributed to the initiative through environmental graphics and augmented reality animations designed to make the garden more engaging, visible, and participatory.
Description & Defining
The experience was designed around participation rather than traditional signage. QR codes and playful augmented reality animations introduced visitors to the garden while encouraging companies within the building to sponsor and support individual areas of the growing space.
The visual system helped connect the physical garden with a digital layer of storytelling, turning a rooftop amenity into an interactive experience that invited tenants to discover, participate, and return.
Challenge & solutions
“Good design does more than communicate an idea. It creates a reason for people to engage with it.” HAMLET CABRERA
The challenge was to create communication that could explain the initiative without making the garden feel overly instructional or corporate. The solution combined simple environmental graphics, QR-based interactions, and short AR animations that made participation intuitive and added an element of discovery to the space.
The result was a system that supported both practical use and community engagement: tenants could understand how the garden worked, learn how to participate, and even harvest fresh ingredients to take back to their offices.
