At AT&T’s annual Ignite conference, attendees expect to enter curious and leave inspired. We created an interactive experience that would assist the AT&T Design Thinking team in making a splash among their colleagues across the AT&T Technology & Innovation landscape.
AT&T Ignite is the largest internal conference of the year, uniting executives together to collaborate and share ideas for the year to come. To make a splash during Ignite, AT&T’s Design Thinking team needed to weave a powerful and immersive story to illustrate that design is not purely aesthetic – it’s good business.
The goal of this project was to excite company leaders about AT&T’s Design Thinking principles by using cutting-edge technology to demonstrate the applications and impact of design in business. Because many AT&T executives in attendance led teams that were not intrinsically design-oriented, it was important to engage the audience in unique ways that transcended the borders of any single discipline.
To ensure the integrity of the AT&T Design Thinking team’s vision, this project’s success depended on high collaboration with the client. As such, the Design Thinking team was closely involved in the creation of the project’s narrative from the start. We began by prototyping an immersive projection display that would inspire attendees to discover ways that design thinking principles could extend to their roles and teams beyond the conference.
Whereas a projection ordinarily displays an image superimposed upon a screen, our team needed a hard surface to display black cut vinyl graphics. The team constructed the entire projection apparatus for this project in-house, resulting in a custom aluminum frame and mount to house the display units. A frosted rear projection vinyl was selected to optimally diffuse light from two 15k-lumen ultra short-throw projectors, and touchscreen displays made the apparatus engaging at a user’s fingertips.
Built in tandem with the immersive technical elements of the installation, our team designed a narrative using data elements to drive a story. As the user interacted with the display, the system would assess ways in which design thinking could enhance their role. Each character’s journey was driven by custom illustrations created by our design team, and to further imbue the display with elements of curiosity and wonder, animations danced across the screen while a user was immersed in the experience, reactive to decisions a user made through touch.
We designed the installation’s narrative to be interactive; as the user moved through their own story of design, the experience would interact and respond. Our team created a system that communicated with one developed separately by AT&T, establishing protocol that would execute commands cross-application between the physical installation and the projected content stream.
Tasked with creating a resonant and impactful experience that embodied the power of design, the fully-customized, responsive projection experience made the core of the project – the intersection of design and technology – truly shine. Designed to defy audience expectations, we collaborated seamlessly with the AT&T Design Thinking Team to overcome physical and technical challenges and deliver an experience that truly delighted users at Ignite.
