Chuck Hoberman designed the seven-storey high expandable LED screen for U2's 360° tour.

As daily life becomes fixated around screens - from a small smartphone to hi-def LED billboards - the bigger picture around those glowing displays becomes all the more important to our experience.

"If I'm watching something on a screen, I'm dealing with this very small bandwidth of perception," says Chuck Hoberman, founder of New York-based transformable design firm Hoberman Associates. "But when we perceive things, all of our senses are really activated - whether we notice it or not."

Hoberman is an inventor, engineer and sculptor who designs large and small-scale transformable structures for a variety of arenas: consumer goods, art galleries, sporting events, architecture and space exploration. In 2002, his Hoberman arch was the centerpiece of the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City and last year one of his installations was featured in the Museum of Modern Art's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit.

This year, Hoberman completed two major architectural projects: an elegant, wave-like façade on the exterior of high-end Japanese cosmetics brand POLA's new retail space in Tokyo and a massive, transformable video screen for Irish rock band U2's 2009 tour.

Commissioned by architects Yasuda Atelier and Nikken Sekkei, Hoberman created a sensuous second skin for the 14-storey POLA building, which opened this month in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district. He designed 185 shutter-mechanisms housed within the double-glazed façade that can be programmed to move in tandem with a full-spectrum of LED screens.

For U2's 360° tour, he worked with the band's long-time collaborators, Mark Fisher and Willie Williams, and Frederic Opsomer of Innovative Designs to conceptualize a seven-storey tall, elliptical video screen that changes shape and envelopes the band during their show.

The screen hangs from a four-legged superstructure set piece called "The Claw" that spans the 150-foot stage width and is made of stainless steel and aircraft aluminum and consists of 888 LED screens with 50,000 pixels.

In advance of his appearance on the "Building Fiction" experiential design session at the Boards Summit, we caught up with Hoberman to chat about both projects.

What did POLA want to communicate through the façade?
It's quite an important institution in Japan so there's a sense of the aesthetic, which is operating both as aesthetic within the world of fashion and cosmetics but also in the world of art. So the building itself is a very luxuriate piece of artwork and it's performative every evening - there's a show that goes on with a gorgeous spectrum of color and mechanical movement that we brought into it.

How does it stand apart from its surroundings?
It definitely has a dialogue with its surrounding neighbors. A couple doors down is the Chanel building that does have an LED-based façade. It's actually quite lovely, it's a more blurry black-and-white piece but it's also quite static in that there's no physical movement to it.

What kind of experience do you hope people who see the POLA building will have?
I think it's unlike something that is purely a piece of art work, where there's a very one-to-one relationship between the viewer and the object viewed. You're really trying to create a kind of out-of-daily-life experience. The relationship between the viewer and the building is much more contextualized; you're on an urban street, there are a number of visual spatial audio experiences that are speaking to your relationship with the different companies that are communicating their values. When you get to see this building, my notion is that, in some way, it should be extraordinary and harmonious.

You've seen it from the outside now you want to see it from the inside as well. I hope it's evocative; it's something that speaks to a kind of optimistic, future-oriented view of what the city is. Something that is modern and forward looking but it's also sensuous as well.

Are you able to have that experience as well?
No! [laughs] I'm terrible. I can't look at any of these things. I look at them and remember what it took to build them and imagine what could go wrong. That said I don't think I ever really look at the work, when people tell me what they see in the work, I understand it and I have a different perspective as the author.

POLA's new 14-storey building in Ginza houses a retail space and French restaurant.

When have you had an extraordinary experience with someone else's work?
Once when I was one vacation in Croatia, I happened on ["Your Black Horizon"] an amazing installation by Olafur Eliasson on a remote Croatian island that I didn't expect to see. It's a black out box in an enormous room and inside he created a very thin line of color. You basically start to float because you sort of see it as a horizon line. It was as much the surprise of finding yourself in something so unusual as well as the artwork itself. Again, I think there's a lot about how we don't ever really look at anything in isolation. I think it's always in context of personal backgrounds and the physical surroundings of it.

The ad community has only recently awoken to the idea of two-way communication or dialogue. Historically it's been a TV ad talking at you, for example.
The relationship that one has to these larger physical objects is inherently interactive... It has to do with the movement of the body through the space that there's this physical interaction that has an emotional resonance to it. With the immersion in media metaphor... that gets missed a little bit. If I'm watching something on a screen, I'm dealing with this very small bandwidth of perception. But when we perceive things, all of our senses are really activated - whether we notice it or not.