Digital Egg Drop
Role: Conceptual Design, Strategy, Experience
Media: Digital, Print, UI
"Our booth sucks."
In the crowded conference space, a booth containing only a simple vinyl banner and a three-ring binder won't cut it. How do you compete on a budget when your neighbors are literally animatronic dinosaurs and VR flight experiences?
Through several ideation sessions, our team tossed around ideas to attract attendees: a mini trebuchet shooting gallery, sending postcards to museums, talkback walls.
The Concept
We treated SketchUp like LEGO bricks, letting us quickly iterate booth ideas and layouts as we narrowed down a concept.
Ultimately we decided on an egg drop. This simple callback to an early science experience also helped reinforce the message behind the rebrand: Build, Test, Learn. Guests were able to build a drop case, test it, and learn from the outcome in the same way the museum builds exhibits, tests them with actual guests, and refines them before sending them out.
The Egg
While an egg drop was a fun idea, we couldn't justify breaking hundreds of eggs. Decoy eggs wouldn't break correctly. Could we do it digitally?
Long story short: we hollowed out a wooden goose egg, stuffed its guts with tech, and turned it into a reusable egg drop without the mess.
Further iterations are planned with visual feedback via colored lights and different egg materials.
The Experience
We also designed UI for our eggsperience. This gives the user immediate feedback and layers of information that would be impossible with a normal egg drop experience. The screen displays the g-force of the drop, its effect on the egg. The height vs. time graph allows multiple guests to compete while a daily statistics graph shows the successes and failures of the day. Lastly, we included connection status and battery alerts for those facilitating the experience.
The Booth
Our egg experience was part of a larger rebrand effort to refresh our public image. Three-ring binders were shelved in favor of interactive iPad catalogs while the full compendium of exhibits was designed into a hardbound book. Our booth was split into two halves, one side for the egg experience, and one side for interaction with representatives. This split allowed us to present a consistent brand while swapping out the interactive half for a new experience each year.