Designing a commemorative element of the release of three people who at the time were the Americans who had been held in captivity by kidnappers for the longest time.

Celebrating the lives of the rescued Americans while paying homage to the people who died in the incident that led to the kidnapping.

Introduction: In May of 2010 the US Embassy in the city of Bogotá invited us to design and build a memorial for the three American citizens released by the Colombian government in the worldwide known military operation Operación Jaque carried out in the year 2009. The memorial was a celebration and a remembrance for the three Americans who survived and the two pilots who died when the helicopter they were traveling in was knocked down by the insurgents.

Initially the Embassy only wanted to have a memorial plaque; however, after working on the whole design concept, we proposed to include an interactive installation, as the monument would commemorate not only the ones who fell but also the ones who survived, so it could be more interesting to design an object sober enough to honor the memory of those fallen in battle but cheerful enough to celebrate the life of those who survived.

An interactive led sculpture made of the following three different parts was designed:1.Three series of glass cubes of different sizes, each one representing one of the three individuals that came out alive, and a fourth element that represents the other two who died;2.Four metal pedestals that serve to activate the four different type of glass cubes;3.A stainless steel memorial plaque, which contains the commemorative text.

Interactivity initially occurred in four phases as shown by the image, but because the client´s request to remove the pedestals, it ended up occurring only in two. The first occurs by the sensors activation at the time of the movement of people in space, and the second one by previous coding of the LED.