Portray

Showroom Installation
Virtual Environment
Product Visualization

Fellowes Brands

Portray

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.

My Role

PORTRAY began with Fellowes' open-ended desire to elevate their proposed new flagship showroom above the uninspired product museums of their competitors. The creative team and I embarked on a deep research cycle in which we probed both industry and individuals to uncover pain points and frustrations within their workflows, and collect desires and suggestions. Once we and Fellowes had decided upon a direction, I led the user experience design for PORTRAY, carefully mapping user journeys and functionality within the unique hybrid physical/digital interface chosen.

After the user flow and UX had been successfully designed, I aided in the software development (primarily built in the Unreal Engine 5), as well as cataloged and maintained an internal database of products and options. While doing so I spoke with many of Fellowes' experts to understand the intricate ins and outs of their products and product ecosystems so that the flow, functionality, and capabilities of the visualization tools would accurately reflect their uses and capabilities.

Beyond the initial launch for NeoCon, I helped support the product and lead the development as it evolved over time, refining the user experience and expanding the capabilities and catalog of products, all while keeping tabs on the feature set, content library, and user feedback.

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.