producing Immersive Experiences for Good
Build-a-Hub:
a dell storyroom
Building the solar hub story in an modular, interactive experience for dell's 40-year anniversary campaign.
Team
Phoebe Lin
Shayla Thai
Seojin Yoon
Kate Korepova
Sofia Stanziola
Skills
Experience Design, Leadership, Quantitative Research, User Interviews, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Concepting
Timeline
November 2023 - December 2023
Overview
As part of my Dell client project, I worked as a interaction designer on a team of 4 to teach audiences the impact of Dell's Solar Community Hub initiatives through designing 6 modular interactive learning puzzles for a shipping container space.
In this case study, I share how I challenge clients to activate their brand with new and interactive mediums by bringing their stories to life in this content bible my team delivered:
Client Brief
What did dell want us to do?
We were tasked to designing an activation for Dell's 40-year anniversary Welcome to Now campaign to drive up audience awareness of our client's societal impact beyond their innovative laptop technology.
As part of our client brief, we were given the agency to explore any existing initiative that Dell has achieved for our experience. Here, I recognized that embracing ambiguity and building things from zero to one are the norm in a successful immersive experiences.
What we did:
In our research phase, we discovered the Dell Solar Community Hub initative and the stories of people like Luziete Mar who have been impacted by increased access to internet and technology in remote areas like the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. Our client panel told us that Dell has been doing this for a very long time, and we had no idea! We're going to change that by engaging the Austin community.
Interactions
initial concepting
We were challenged by the ambiguity of our client brief during our first week. So, I helped the team put together this user flow for our initial concept pitch in order to get feedback from our clients to explore interests and bounce ideas with our client collaboratively.
spark of inspiration from LA
During this project, we travelled to Los Angeles for the Infinity Festival and visited immersive experiences like Two Bit Circus, where I drew inspiration from their story rooms ("...updating the Escape Room' concept beyond just escaping" - Two Bit Circus).
As an immersive experience designer, I take inspiration from demoing new experiences.
Here are my favorites, including AR Mario Kart, Two Bit Circus Storyroom & "Midway" Games, and Infinity Festival 2024:
pivoting towards audience agency
Through conversations with our mentors and clients, I wanted to push the team in a more interactive direction rather than a 360 movie / dark-ride simulator.
Here, I drafted a new storyboard and experience flow iteration with help from Sofi, the scriptwriter, to pivot our project towards encouraging audience participation to unfold a story through narrative-based roles & puzzles, like the LA Two Bit Circus Storyrooms.
"Smoke & Mirrors"
I led my team in paper prototyping the physical space where we walked our clients through the user flow on the day of our pitch. Here, we visualized the layout of the 6 interactions in a shipping container space! This space featured:
1) A miniature Pepper's Ghost prototype of our character hologram.
2) Paper prototypes of locked doors and puzzles for us to "smoke & mirror" a potential build.
3) The 6 modular boxes each with clues leading up to the final tree growing interaction.
The dell Pitch
Reflection
Client collaboration.
Building from zero to one was one of the most challenging aspects of this project. Our client, Dell, gave us the creative freedom to activate their brand the "Welcome to Now" campaign.
Through creating associations between existing immersive experiences, I learned as an interaction designer to bring in interactions that push experiential learning in new directions.
My goal was to encourage Dell in new ways of thinking through this modular storyroom experience. The strengths of our experiences lied in:
The shipping container creates an exterior venue for new audiences to "stay and charge their phones while participative audiences engage with Dell inside the storyroom."
- Dell Client
Branding. "The Dell color palette in the plant seed interface was a cool detail."
- Dell Client
"The physical-based experience is accessible to older generations for all audiences."
- Dell Client
"I loved the hands on story room your team has created, and the ability to show the different solar hubs around the world that DELL is building. I think you did a good job offering us a character and diving into 1 story of a solar hub"
- Erin Reilly, Founder & Professor at Texas Immersive
Learnings.
Bottleneck. Enter and exit through the same face of the shipping container layout creates congestion.
40 Years. Emphasize Dell's 40 Year Anniversary with features like a map of 40 Solar Hubs.
Overall, this project was special in that I was able to work with real clients from established company for the first time while juggling a networking trip to Los Angeles! I've also come up understand how powerful in-person experiences can be when blended with the just right amount of technology. It was a blast making a shipping container mockup in a spare room on campus.
The 1-2 week turnaround we had to make after the trip was a good learning experience in understanding that creative inspiration comes from gathering new experiences.
As part of the Experimental Storytelling class in the Texas Immersive sequence, this project is one of the 6 deliverables that Dell Technologies will draw inspiration from in future activations.