Night render: floating fragments of a Chinese garden, with pavilions, moon gates and stairways lit against a deep blue ground

Cultural heritage experience design · Concept, 2025–present

Moongate Garden

月门花园

A concept project. The product, the rules and the study described below are proposals. None of them has been built or tested yet.

What if leaving a historic site didn’t mean leaving the experience behind?

Role
Solo project: concept, experience design, spatial design, 3D modeling, visualization
Type
Cultural heritage experience · Themed entertainment
Context
Course project, SCAD, 2025; developed independently in 2026
Tools
SketchUp, Adobe Photoshop

Overview

A visit that keeps growing

Moongate Garden imagines a heritage experience that begins with a real visit and doesn’t end when visitors leave. The photos they take, the notes they write, and the time and length of their stay grow into a dreamlike garden of their own. Back home, they can walk through it again and find each memory where they left it.

Rather than recreating historic architecture, it invites people to rediscover a place through exploration, imagination and personal memory, so that a brief encounter becomes a lasting connection.

9
zones. Each zone a visitor photographs becomes one fragment of their garden.
4
inputs. Time of day, length of visit, photos and notes decide how the garden looks.
0
apps. Scan the code on the ticket and the companion opens in the browser.
1
garden per visitor. Every return visit grows the same garden.

The question

Arrive, look around, leave

How might we extend a cultural heritage experience beyond the physical visit?

  1. 01How does the garden a visitor remembers differ from the garden that exists?
  2. 02How have Chinese garden and landscape-painting traditions let people revisit a place after leaving it?
  3. 03How can the qualities of memory become a spatial design language?

Chinese gardens are designed to be walked, with views that unfold one step at a time. Yet most visits come down to three steps: arrive, look around, leave. Once visitors walk out, the experience is over, and what remains is a camera roll they may never open again. Many digital heritage projects aim for faithful reproduction. They preserve the form of a place, but not anyone’s experience of it.

Traditional visitMoongate Garden
TimeA one-time visit that ends at the exitBegins on site and continues after the visitor leaves
HeritageRecreated as faithfully as possibleRediscovered through exploration, imagination and memory
MemoryA camera roll, cut off from the placePhotos and notes kept where they happened
BondA brief encounterA lasting connection with a place

老疾俱至，名山恐难遍睹，唯当澄怀观道，卧以游之。

“Old age and illness have come upon me together. I fear I will hardly see all the famous mountains. I will clear my mind, contemplate the Way, and travel to them lying down.”

Zong Bing (375–443), in Song shu, 488 · translation mine

Framework

Three ideas, three decisions

The project rests on three ideas, and each one leads directly to a design decision. The approach draws on research through design (Zimmerman, Forlizzi & Evenson, 2007): making the work is itself a way of finding things out.

01

Memory

Memory is rebuilt, and it is spatial

Psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed that remembering is an act of reconstruction, not replay. Urban planner Kevin Lynch found that people hold a city in mind through paths, nodes and landmarks, not as a complete map.

SoThe garden doesn’t recreate the whole site. It keeps only the zones a visitor photographed, and pins each note where it was written, so that returning to the spot brings the memory back.

Bartlett, Remembering, 1932 · Lynch, The Image of the City, 1960

02

Place

Place is made by experience

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argued that space becomes place as people fill it with experience and meaning. Heritage scholar Laurajane Smith critiqued the “authorized heritage discourse,” in which a site’s meaning is set mainly by experts and official interpretation.

SoThere is no standard garden. The same site, through different combinations of its nine zones, grows a different garden for each person, and personal memory stands alongside the official story.

Tuan, Space and Place, 1977 · Smith, Uses of Heritage, 2006

03

Tradition

Traveling while lying down

The fifth-century painter Zong Bing loved mountains and traveled widely. When age and illness kept him home, he painted the landscapes he had walked on the walls of his room and revisited them from his bed.

SoMoongate Garden follows the same pattern: go, bring something back, revisit it at home.

Song shu (History of the Liu Song, 488), Biography of Zong Bing

Why Moongate Garden is a contemporary wo you

As I read it, wo you (卧游), “traveling while lying down,” is more than looking at a picture instead of going. It rests on four things: the places are ones you have been, the journey happens in the mind of the viewer, you can move through them, and the point is to keep a bond with the landscape. Moongate Garden is designed around each one.

Zong Bing’s wo youMoongate Garden
SourceHe painted only places he had traveled: “wherever he had walked, he painted on his walls.”The garden grows only from photos and notes the visitor made on site. Zones they never visited or photographed do not appear.
FormThe painting is a small likeness of real mountains. The journey happens in the cleared mind of the person looking at it.The garden is not a likeness. It takes the shape of memory: only the remembered fragments, floating, shifted and reconnected.
MovementThe body stays still while the eye and mind travel. Guo Xi later wrote that the best landscapes can be wandered in and lived in.At home, on a screen or in a headset, visitors walk back along the paths and find their photos and notes where they left them.
PurposeToo old and ill to go again, he kept his bond with the mountains through painting.After the visit, the garden keeps the bond with the place, and invites another trip to the real site.

Where it departs from the tradition

The painting draws itself

Zong Bing painted by hand and aimed for likeness. Moongate Garden grows from the visitor’s footsteps, time and words. It keeps only what memory keeps.

The painting keeps growing

Once hung, a painting stays the same. The garden gains fragments and changes its hour with every new visit.

Open to every visitor

Wo you belonged mostly to a small circle of literati. Moongate Garden makes it something any visitor can take home.

Experience

The exit becomes a turning point

A traditional visit ends at the exit. In Moongate Garden, the exit is where something begins: as visitors leave, they receive a garden that has just grown.

User journey: arrive, explore, leave, return, reconnect. The emotion curve rises at the exit instead of fading.
Fig. 01User journey: arrive, explore, leave, return, reconnect. The emotion curve rises at the exit instead of fading.

Three moments

On site, every photo and note is tagged to where it was made.
Fig. 02On site, every photo and note is tagged to where it was made.
At the exit, the visit becomes a garden.
Fig. 03At the exit, the visit becomes a garden.
At home, each memory waits where it was left.
Fig. 04At home, each memory waits where it was left.

System

How a visit becomes a garden

Four things every visit already produces feed a few rules that shape the garden. The rules are simple and visible, so anyone can see why their garden looks the way it does.

01Time of day

Whether the latest visit was in the day or the evening sets the garden’s hour.

02Length of visit

The longer the visit, the more paths connect the fragments.

03Photos

Each zone a visitor photographs becomes a fragment of the garden.

04Notes

Each note stays where it was written, waiting to be read again.

Four inputs pass through the moon gate and become the garden’s hour, paths, places and notes.
Fig. 05Four inputs pass through the moon gate and become the garden’s hour, paths, places and notes.

Why a garden, and not a map of photos?

Look / Walk

A map is looked at. A garden can be walked again, gate by gate, in the order the visit unfolded.

Accurate / Remembered

A map is accurate. A garden takes the shape of memory: what you remember stays, and the rest falls away.

Tool / Place

A map is a tool. A garden is a place. People miss places; nobody misses a map.

Product

A companion that stays out of the way

A proposed browser-based mobile companion that stays quiet during the visit and opens the garden afterward.

Begin your visit, plant a memory, your garden is ready, return anytime.
Fig. 06Begin your visit, plant a memory, your garden is ready, return anytime.
Memories, visits, the garden at night, and sharing.
Fig. 07Memories, visits, the garden at night, and sharing.

How it could work

Every step uses technology that already exists: a QR code, the phone’s browser and camera, GPS, and a 3D viewer on the web. The heritage site supplies a zone map and a fragment library once, up front. Beyond scanning one code, visitors do little they wouldn’t already do.

01On site

Scan the QR code on the ticket to join. Take photos as usual; a short note is optional. GPS places each photo in one of nine zones. If the signal is weak, the visitor taps the zone on a small map.

02At the exit

Photos taken with the phone’s own camera can be added too. A set of rules assembles the garden from the fragment library and saves it to a private link sent by email.

03At home

The garden opens on a phone or computer. Every new visit adds to the same garden. It is private by default, and visitors choose what to share.

The site receives only aggregate, anonymized counts of which zones visitors remember most. Photos and notes stay in the visitor’s private garden and are never shared with the site.

Technical spec

Buildable with what exists

A first version could be built by a small team with off-the-shelf tools. Numbers marked as targets are starting points to tune in testing.

Capture

Mobile web app

Opened from a QR code. Uses the phone camera, the browser’s location service and the photo’s own time and place data. No install.

Garden viewer

3D on the web

Three.js loading glTF (.glb) fragments. Works on phones and laptops; WebXR adds headset support later.

Back end

Small and private

Object storage for photos, a small database for visits and notes, and transactional email for the garden link.

Data model

ObjectHoldsNotes
SiteNine zones, each with a name, a boundary and one fragment modelSupplied once by the heritage site
VisitStart time, end timeCreated when the ticket is scanned
MemoryVisit, zone, time, photo, optional noteZone set by GPS or by a tap on the map
GardenAll visits, the fragments they unlocked, the current hourOne per visitor, private by default

Generation rules

OutputRuleTarget
FragmentsEvery zone with at least one memory becomes a fragment1 to 9 per garden
HourIf the latest visit started after 5 pm, the garden turns to night; otherwise it is dayTwo lighting presets, matching the day and night renders
PathsThe shortest route linking the fragments along the site’s node graph; visits over 90 minutes also add side routesThreshold to tune in testing
NotesPinned to the anchor point of their zoneUp to 3 per zone shown at once

Asset pipeline

From SketchUp to the web

Split the SketchUp model into nine groups, one per zone. Export each as glTF, simplify in Blender, then bake day and night lighting to match the renders.

Performance

Budget

Target under 5 MB to open a garden and a steady frame rate on a recent phone. Fragments load one at a time, nearest first.

Privacy

Visitor owns the garden

Any memory, or the whole garden, can be deleted at any time. The site only sees aggregate, anonymized zone counts.

When things go wrong

CaseWhat happens
Weak GPSThe visitor taps the zone on a small map
Photo outside every zoneIt goes to an “Unplaced” tray, where the visitor can drag it to a zone
Didn’t join on siteAt the exit, photos from the camera roll are matched to the visit by time and place
No emailThe garden link is saved by scanning a code at the exit

Spatial design

A garden as memory keeps it

Moon gates, pavilions, roofs and stairs are lifted out of the garden and set adrift, the way memory keeps a doorway but loses what stood around it. The red bridge is a deliberate stylization. One main route climbs from it through nine nodes. Those nine nodes are also the nine zones where photos are planted, so the spatial design and the product share a single map.

Eight line-drawn fragments, including a moon gate, pavilion, raised pavilion and round window.
Fig. 08Eight line-drawn fragments, including a moon gate, pavilion, raised pavilion and round window.

Five moves from garden to dream

A reading of the finished world: what happens to familiar garden forms once they pass through memory.

MoveIn a Chinese gardenIn Moongate Garden
ExtractA pavilion is one stop along a winding routeIt stands alone before a floating wall
LiftWaterside pavilions often stand on piersThe water is gone; the piers hang in the air
RescaleGarden bridges are often only a few steps longThe red bridge becomes the longest path in the garden
ReconnectRockeries suggest stairs climbing into the cloudsReal stairways join places that were never neighbors
InhabitHalls and pavilions were built for sitting, reading and gatheringOne figure per room, lit like a remembered scene
Circulation: the main route, side routes and nine numbered nodes.
Fig. 09Circulation: the main route, side routes and nine numbered nodes.

My role

Four hats, one designer

Moongate Garden is a solo project. The work fell into four parts, and each one shaped the others.

i

Concept and research

Turned a set of renders into a question about heritage, and grounded the answer in memory, place and the wo you tradition.

  • Framed the main question and three sub-questions
  • Read across psychology, geography, heritage studies and Chinese painting theory
  • Translated Zong Bing’s passage and mapped wo you onto the design
ii

Experience and product design

Designed what a visitor actually does, from the ticket to the living room.

  • User journey and three-panel storyboard
  • Four generation rules, kept simple enough to explain
  • Eight companion screens and the on-site, exit and home flow
iii

Spatial design and 3D modeling

Built the world itself, and made its map double as the product’s map.

  • SketchUp model of nine fragments along one route
  • Fragment sheet and circulation diagram
  • Five moves from garden to dream
iv

Visualization

Developed the line, day and night renders that give the world its mood.

  • Layered Photoshop method over SketchUp output
  • Earlier color study in teal and violet
  • Diagrams for the system and the journey

Key decisions

Five turning points

Each turning point started with a problem in the earlier version.

01

A visit that continues after the exit

ConsideredA VR theme park built around the renders

The renders showed a world but not what it was for. Tying it to a real visit gave it a purpose.

02

Nine coarse zones

ConsideredExact GPS points for every photo

Phone GPS drifts by several meters, so exact points would misplace memories. Nine zones also match the nine nodes of the spatial design.

03

A few visible rules

ConsideredAI that generates a garden from photos

Visitors should understand why their garden looks the way it does. Rules are also predictable and cheap to run.

04

A browser companion opened from the ticket

ConsideredA downloadable app

Most heritage visitors come once. Few will install an app for a single afternoon.

05

A site-agnostic system

ConsideredAnchoring the concept to one named historic garden

Any garden that supplies a zone map and a fragment library can run it, which makes the idea easier to pilot.

Proposed evaluation

How I would test it

No user testing has been done yet. A small comparison study is proposed to test the core idea:

Will a garden built from a visitor’s own memories feel more like theirs, and give them more reason to return, than a faithful replica?

Participants

Visitors who have recently toured a classical Chinese garden.

Conditions

A faithful virtual replica, compared with a memory garden grown from the participant’s own photos and notes.

Measures

Sense of ownership, clarity of recall and intent to revisit, through questionnaires and short interviews.

Follow-up

A few weeks later, track which version participants choose to open on their own.

Limitations: the rules, screens and system are proposals and have not been built. Open questions include GPS accuracy under tree cover, the cost of storing photos, and how a site would maintain its fragment library.

Process

From a world to an experience

The project grew in two stages: first a world, then a reason for it to exist. The next stage is still ahead.

2025 · SCAD

Stage 01

Building the world

A Photoshop rendering course project. I modeled the garden fragments in SketchUp and developed them in Photoshop as line, day and night versions.

The working Photoshop file shows the method layer by layer: a base render from SketchUp, the SketchUp linework laid over it, paper and material textures set to Multiply, a painted shadow layer at about 20% opacity, cut-out trees and figures, and Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustments to set the mood.

What I did

  • SketchUp model
  • Layered render method
  • Teal-and-violet color study

What came out of it

  • Line render
  • Day render
  • Night render

Renders

Line, day and night, developed from one SketchUp model

Day render
Fig. 10Day render
Line render
Fig. 11Line render
Earlier color study in teal and violet, from the working Photoshop file
Fig. 12Earlier color study in teal and violet, from the working Photoshop file
Night render
Fig. 13Night render

2026 · Extension

Stage 02

Making it an experience

The renders showed a world but not what it was for. I reframed it as a heritage-tourism concept and designed the user journey, the rules and the product around a real visit.

What I did

  • Reframed the world around a real visit
  • Built the research framework
  • Wrote the rules and technical spec

What came out of it

  • User journey and storyboards
  • System and spatial diagrams
  • Eight companion screens

Next

Stage 03

Prototype and pilot

A proposed path from concept to pilot, in five steps. None of them has started.

01Garden viewer

Split the model into nine fragments, export to glTF, load in a browser viewer with day and night presets.

02Rules engine

Implement the four rules and generate gardens from three sample visits to check that each reads as different.

03Capture

Mobile web capture with zone snapping and camera-roll import, walk-tested in a public garden.

04Study

Run the comparison study and revise the rules from the results.

05Headset

A WebXR walk-through, and a pilot conversation with one heritage site.

References

  1. Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.
  2. Guo Xi & Guo Si (Comp.). (11th c.). Linquan gaozhi [Lofty Message of Forests and Streams].
  3. Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. MIT Press.
  4. Shen Yue (Comp.). (488). Song shu [History of the Liu Song]. Biography of Zong Bing.
  5. Smith, L. (2006). Uses of heritage. Routledge.
  6. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
  7. Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Evenson, S. (2007). Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI. Proceedings of CHI 2007, 493–502.
  8. Zong Bing. (5th c.). Hua shanshui xu [Preface on Landscape Painting].

Credits

Design
Jingwen Li
Course
SCAD, 2025
Figures and plants
Stock assets, used for visualization