Formula D Interactive: A Cape Town Studio for Interactive Learning

The studio is a specialist design consultancy for interactive learning. It produces online courses, e-learning applications, induction programs, product tutorials and interactive games, and it designs for the web as well as for touch screens, interactive tables, interactive floors and giant touch walls. For corporate expos, museums and science centers it builds exhibits that explain complex procedures in simple terms through hands-on, physical interaction.

One product is a 3D kiosk: a large display that shows interactive content as photorealistic 3D objects and needs no 3D glasses. A gesture recognition system in the front panel lets visitors rotate the floating objects by hand and press virtual buttons just by pointing. For a science and technology museum in Saudi Arabia, the studio and Wireframe Studio developed 21 digital interactive media installations. It also made an interactive projection for the Cape Town Tourism visitor center.

Designer Michael Wolf heads the studio. He moved to Cape Town from Germany in 2003 and founded Formula D in early 2007. Before that he worked on human-computer interaction for learning at the MARS Exploratory Media Lab of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, co-founded the Cologne design studio Formlos, and served as design coordinator at MTE Studios in Cape Town, where he contributed to the traveling exhibition Islamic Science Rediscovered. He has received several awards, including the IF Design Award.

As of November 2026 the studio operates as formula D_ at formula-d.com. Its site calls it an experiential design agency for museums and science centers and lists services from experience master planning and research to design, technical development and interactive media production. The sectors named are museums and heritage sites, tourist attractions and visitor centers, interactive children's museums, urban experience and placemaking, and parks and conservation centers. The older formula-d.co.za address leads to the www version of the new domain, which does not load, so the working address is formula-d.com without the www.

A trade article from October 2023 quotes Michael Wolf as co-CEO of formula D_ and describes two of its projects: River of Grass, a large projection space about the Everglades at the Frost Science museum in Miami, and Wonderdal, a children's activity center for ages 5 to 13 commissioned by a South African wine estate owner.