Effy Lans in Bloom turns sticky notes into a living projection

Effy Lan’s In Bloom Turns Sticky Notes Into a Living Projection at Seattle Design Festival

17 October 2026

Photo: Little Stories by Rosie (@littlestoriesbyrosie)

An interactive garden shaped by people

In Bloom is an interactive projected garden that reorganizes itself around the sticky notes people leave on it. Created by Seattle-based motion designer Effy Lan, the piece appeared on August 16, 2026, in the Pop-Up Zone at Lake Union Park as part of the Seattle Design Festival’s IN[flux] Block Party. Rather than presenting a fixed image, the wall is shaped entirely by the people who use it: each sticky note placed on the projection becomes a small piece of structure that the garden must work around, and the evolving composition becomes a record of everyone who stopped by that afternoon.

How the installation works

Visitors write on a sticky note and put it anywhere on the projection wall. Projected flowers fall from above, and when they meet a note they break, settle, and grow around it. Nothing that breaks disappears. When a visitor moves a note, the garden moves with it. The interaction requires no screens, apps, or instructions: paper and a pen are the only interface, which made the piece open to visitors of every age.

Photo: Little Stories by Rosie (@littlestoriesbyrosie)

The installation invited small, personal gestures that accumulated into communal patterns. A child made a flower from sticky notes and pressed it onto the screen. A man who looked to be nearly seventy stopped, wrote a blessing for young people, and added it to the wall. “Watching so many strangers put their own words on my screen, I felt connected to this community,” said Lan.

Design and technology

Lan designed and built the entire system herself. A physics simulation built with pygame and pymunk governs how the flowers fall, break apart, and accumulate. A real-time vision model detects each sticky note as it is placed or moved, and a browser-based control panel allows the piece to be adjusted live on site.

Site and conditions

The Pop-Up Zone at Lake Union Park offered no access to power, and festival organizers advised partners to expect sun, heat, and wind. To meet those conditions, In Bloom ran on a portable power station and used a tent to protect the projection surface. The installation was open to the public from 2:30 to 6:30 pm.

At the Seattle Design Festival

The Seattle Design Festival, organized by AIA Seattle, is free and open to the public. Lan was selected as a funding awardee for the 2026 edition, with the festival’s planning team describing her as a partner that “exemplifies our Festival goals.” The 2026 Block Party drew more than 7,700 attendees.

“Receiving funding from the Seattle Design Festival was the first time an institution backed my installation work,” said Lan. “After years of making motion and video for brands and companies, it felt like a real welcome into Seattle’s design community.”

About the designer

Effy Lan is a motion designer based in Seattle whose practice spans motion design, video direction, generative art, creative coding, and projection-based installation. At Amazon, she is a Designer, Motion & Video Lead on the Internal Corporate Communications team, where she leads video content for the company’s global all-hands meetings and major internal events. Between 2019 and 2021, she was a credited motion designer on ten episodes for DxChannel (当下频道), an independent Chinese explanatory video studio, whose episodes featuring her work have been viewed more than one million times on Bilibili. From 2020 to 2022, as a multimedia designer at Shopee, she worked on more than 150 promotional videos for the company’s Latin American markets, where she proposed localizing animated characters to reflect the skin tones of local audiences. For the 2025–2026 cycle, she served as a judge for the Telly Awards and the A’ Design Award.

Lan grew up in Chengdu, China. She holds bachelor’s degrees in visual communication design and English, and a Master of Communication in Digital Media from the University of Washington. “Moving between Chinese and English taught me that the same idea can land very differently depending on who’s listening,” she said. “Design is how I try to close that gap.”

In Bloom (2026) by Effy Lan (Xiaojing Lan). Watch the Seattle Design Festival’s interview with the designer: https://youtu.be/0zJK0w62twk

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