At the heart of the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is the Emerging Issues Commons, a dynamic interactive installation focused on public policy where visitors come to learn, collaborate, and take action.

In conjunction with the Institute for Emerging Issues, Second Story worked to create a platform that enables and inspires civic engagement, putting the tools of public policy into everyone’s hands. The result, the Emerging Issues Commons, is a suite of interactives that shares the narrative of North Carolina, focusing on the core issues of Economy, Education, Environments, and Health. More than just a physical installation, the Commons is an invitation to participate, an experience with democracy woven into its DNA.

As visitors navigate the space, they explore data-driven interactives, personal stories, and social media integration, all orchestrated to tell the larger story at hand: the story of North Carolina. The “Pulse,” the cascading ribbon sculpture at the center of the room, broadcasts a streaming flow of news, tweets, and statistics. Interactive stations throughout the Commons, including a 16-foot interactive wall that reacts to a visitor’s presence, display salient statistics and data, educating citizens so they can make better-informed decisions. As a complement to the numbers-focused interactives, a series of personality-driven videos offer the flipside of the data: the voices of everyday North Carolinians sharing stories about their state in their own words.

On the web, the Commons website brings it all together for a broader audience, allowing people from all over the state to participate and enabling a global audience to learn about North Carolina. An intuitive, comprehensive content management system provides a tool to create and manage content, putting the power into the hands of the Institute.