What does the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem of the fu­ture look like? What does it mean when ori­en­ta­tion in­creas­ingly takes place dig­i­tally? And what ben­e­fits, what pos­si­bil­i­ties, does this pro­vide? These are the ques­tions Moni­teurs asked it­self early on, within the frame­work of a self-ini­ti­ated re­search pro­ject in 2007. “Points of In­ter­est” play­fully tests the link be­tween real and vir­tual spaces. Moni­teurs’ of­fice kitchen is pro­jected onto the screen as a vir­tual room. Users choose a di­rec­tion from a se­ries of cards, and are then tracked by a cam­era. They then re­ceive user-spe­cific in­for­ma­tion on the screen, rel­a­tive to their lo­ca­tion. If there are mul­ti­ple peo­ple in the space, then graph­ics and con­tent are over­lapped.

Moni­teurs has grown in re­cent years. More pro­jects, more teams means more meet­ings. With the re­struc­tur­ing of the of­fice spread over two floors, it be­came clear that the meet­ing rooms and their oc­cu­pancy must be bet­ter com­mu­ni­cated to every­one. A team from Moni­teurs de­vel­oped an ob­ject that en­ables bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween the work­space on the up­per floor and the con­fer­ence room in the base­ment. It was to be com­bined anal­o­gously with dig­i­tal and im­ple­mented in 3D print­ing.

Moni­teurs ini­ti­ated the “In­fo­tracks” pro­ject in con­junc­tion with De­sign­mai 2006. It is a pho­to­graphic col­lec­tion of graph­ics and ty­pog­ra­phy seen in the ur­ban space of Berlin. As such it shows how sym­bols, colours and struc­tures shape a city and what vi­sual lan­guage the city speaks. In the web-based im­age archive, di­rec­tions are given from the Moni­teurs of­fice to the De­signcity ex­hi­bi­tion hall. The lo­ca­tion of each photo is recorded on a map of Berlin. The “vis­i­tor” re­traces the var­i­ous routes. He fo­cuses on var­i­ous themes. He dis­cov­ers trails and paths along which he moves every day.