The Optical Terrace: An Example Of Multidisciplinarity In Student-Led Initiatives

In honor of UNESCO'S First International Day of Light (IDL) in 2018, Universite Laval's SPIE Student Chapter set out to design a large-scale outreach initiative that would be both artistic and educational. The goal of this project was to design a new way for people to interact with light through human-scaled experiments outside of traditional channels such as schools, museum or libraries. It was realized that the required skills to fulfill requirements would exceed those of the mostly physics-oriented student chapter.Between the three consecutive yearly editions of The Optical Terrace, multidisciplinarity was a focus for this student-led initiative. Promoting collaboration between physics, architecture, art, marketing and communication has proven to be a challenge that our team has learned to manage. In this paper, we will explain the solutions we came up with that had the most success in keeping active involvement of our members and to steer the design within our requirements.