Fellowes Brands
PORTRAY
Showroom Installation
Virtual Environment
Product Visualization
Solution
A groundbreaking experiential installation which transforms the conceptualization phase, enabling real-time visualization and collaboration directly between customers, designers, and the brand.
Insight
The initial stages of interior design projects are fraught with friction as translating visionary ideas into tangible plans is a slow, iterative process with many roadblocks and obstacles.
Challenge
Fellowes is building a brand experience center for their workspace solutions business and wants to establish a space which is more meaningful and collaborative than the typical museum-style showroom.
PORTRAY was a beast of a project to tackle. Drawing on a combination of many past installations and interactive builds, navigating the design and implementation problems was a tall order. I worked on this project from the start, ideating how to use the client’s key products to both dazzle the user with innovative convenience and to bring their vision to the big screen. Designing UX from scratch was a blank canvas with many nooks and crannies and a multitude of ways to navigate the experience. Ultimately having mapped the many user journeys, I wanted to give the UI soft lines and wispy transitions that both reflected Fellowes brand identity, and also elicited a dreamlike feel that lets users craft their envisioned environment as if straight from their minds.
Alongside the digital interface, I also designed the physical tokens that were used to represent the products and materials themselves. At first they were quite chunky and could probably kill a man if thrown from a 10th story window. But after a couple rounds of resizing, reprinting, and smoothing sharp corners—the tokens were the size of a blocky business card that felt good in the hand and on the table.
After days of QA & QC testing, making sure that each part of the experience worked correctly, I helped launch, pitch, and present at the premier trade show NeoCon. It was a marvelous time being able to show off a years worth of dedicated design, animation, and UX/UI work.
My Role
Reception
PORTRAY made its debut at the renowned industry convention NeoCon, and immediately met with overwhelming praise—many parties even claiming they would fly their clients to Chicago in order to save weeks of back-and-forth. PORTRAY is meant to be a living experience, evolving as Fellowes evolves, providing a anchor point around which Fellowes, their clients, dealers, and designers can continue to collaborate long into the future.
Development
Through a number of iterations, PORTRAY came to life as a 27-foot-wide curved projection display controlled by a pair of touchscreen tables to enable users to create, customize, and iterate design concepts for interior spaces. By the use of physical tokens representing products and materials elegantly, along with robust but carefully considered digital UI system, users can configure everything from a stapler to an entire office. These products and spaces would then spring to life instantly before the users' eyes thanks to a custom-built 3D visualization system leveraging state-of-the-art technology for unprecedented instantaneous realism.
Background
In the midst of a company-wide rebrand and refresh, Fellowes set out to establish a defining brand experience center to cement their position as a global leader in workspace solutions. To make this experience truly unique and attuned to the needs of their industry, they came to our team as experts in the field of creative technological integrations. We immediately sought to create for them an experience which would function not only as a impressive technical whiz-bang, but as a tool around which they, their partners, and their customers could congregate to gain genuine insight about what they had to offer each other.
PORTRAY
A groundbreaking experiential installation in Fellowes' flagship showroom in Chicago empowers clients to visualize their projects in unprecedented realism and with remarkable ease.