Responsibilities
- creative lead
- experience design
- concept development
- booth design and fabrication
- prototyping
- user testing
The FIRST Robotics Competition is the Super Bowl of robotics for kids where student teams compete head-to-head on a special playing field with robots they have designed, built, and programmed.
While at Second Story, I worked on a booth-activation project for our client, NRG, a renewable energy company that tackles the world's energy problems with creative solutions. NRG partners with FIRST through support and volunteer mentorship "to encourage the next generation of thinkers, tinkerers and doers to make the world a better place."
From concept to completion, my role as creative lead and UX designer on the project involved leading collaborative brainstorming, refining and presenting the concept, designing and testing interactions that applied age-appropriate game mechanics, and wrapping the experience in a holistic clean-energy theme that NRG could own. The lean team also included 2 engineers, a visual designer and a producer.
Impact
Thousands of young competitors applied their STEM curiosity and creativity at NRG's branded booth activation, walking away with memories and unique physical expressions of their experience.
Overview
To connect with the brightest young people in STEM, we designed a booth activity that created a fun activity the competitors could share with their friends.
The experience of drawing with robots manned by physical controls tapped into the tinkerer's impulse to unlock the way things things work through hands-on exploration. The simple activity was easy to learn and fun to repeat, encouraging multiple visits over the days-long event.
Our task was to design, engineer and build a booth experience from scratch for NRG to offer an attractive, positive and energetic space for competitors and their families, to create shared memories and take home a lasting impression of fun at this once-in-a-lifetime event.
Challenges
Attract smart young audiences
The branded booth should appeal to NRG's young future employees who share values of innovation, creativity and teamwork.
Time and budget
The lean budget and short timeline for this project challenged our team deliver a minimum lovable product. We fabricated in house and applied an exposed-structure aesthetic that honored competitors' resourceful nature and emulated their own robotic prototypes that came to battle.
We wanted to create a moment for competitors to enjoy a creative challenge with their friends and use robot technology in unexpected ways.
How might we...
- Design a space that delights young audiences
- Make NRG's booth stand out in a sea of others
- Celebrate the spirit of teamwork
- Make fun effortless
- Make the experience memorable
- Simplify tasks for booth staff
Discovery
We learned about the opportunity space through secondary research and interviews with NRG stakeholders.
Stakeholder interviews
We held interviews with a few key marketing employees to set success criteria and understand the business goals for a partnership and presence at FIRST.
We probed on learnings from prior event booths at FIRST to uncover opportunities for improvement.
“We want people to feel comfortable approaching the booth and then also feel comfortable sticking around – a no pressure, relaxing environment versus us pushing them to participate in something.”
“We would like the audience to walk away knowing at least a little bit about who NRG is. And it’s fine if that is simply 'NRG is a progressive energy company.'”
Secondary research
To better understand the competition vibe, mission and environment, we analyzed the event website, social media and YouTube reels showing highlights and interviews.
We also explored relevant social media posts from the competitors public accounts to understand what excited them and how they expressed team spirit.
Guiding principles
We aligned business goals with audience insights from discovery activities to create a set of guiding principles for the concept.
The experience should...
Tap into the roboticist's drive to create with their hands in a fun space that takes their mind off competition pressure back in the pits.
Remove complexities for users and for people staffing the booth. In a noisy, distracting competition environment, guests who walk up should immediately know what to do.
Competitors come to FIRST as a team. Create a shared experience they do together with the support of their other partner in STEM, NRG.
Give people more than a memory to take away. With so much excitement the day of, make moments spent at the booth easy to revisit and enjoy after the event.
Design, prototyping & testing
Running with the concept of robotic art stations, we turned broad ideas into usable, fun and feasible UX solutions with a "get real fast" approach to designing and prototyping.
As UX lead, I made the user journeys, spatial diagrams, and state diagrams to visually communicate with engineers and business stakeholders. We made physical prototypes to user test with coworkers' children in our lab, gather feedback and iterate toward improvement before launch.
User journey
This time-based flow organized by experience phases describes user actions and system/robot responses.
Spatial diagrams
To remove barriers to entry and invite easy engagement from passersby, three stations are strategically placed at the perimeter.
After early client reviews, we learned the booth would be flanked by others, and so we revised the design as shown in the render.
State diagrams
Engineers and designers working in parallel maintained a living shared document as source of truth. This system flow specifies how to program robot behavior as feedback for users' actions at key decision points.
Converging on UX Solutions
After user testing and design reviews with stakeholders, we further refined the experience to express the needs and desires of both.
Let creativity happen in a crowd
The table’s physical design encouraged teamwork by at least two people: one to control the knobs while others placed the robots from any side and art directed together.
Pick up robots with personality
From user testing, we saw people grab and place active robots where they wanted them to draw on the table. To accommodate this, we built the robot enclosures to be grabbable and durable as well as functional and aesthetic.
Dial in clean energy themes
Two knobs labeled “wind” and “sun” create a clean energy theme. Functionally, they control robots’ speed and pattern intensity, respectively. Tinkerers played to discover the algorithm.
"Set-it-and-forget-it" to charge bots, focus on guests
Robot docking stations doubled as charging pads so bots ran continuously without a hitch, freeing NRG booth staff to network with their visitors.
With robotics as with energy, NRG is rethinking how things are typically done.
Results and outcome
Art-making robots at a high-stakes championship give young engineers a chance to escape the pressure in the pits, make memories with their teammates and creatively direct a fleet of drawing robots with the simulated power of clean energy.
NRG's event activation immersed thousands in curiosity and creativity, stimulating bright minds of the future to pursue expressive applications of science and engineering.
How it works
Walk up to an interactive art station and team up with energy robots as partners versus products.
Use controls on the table to adjust levels of wind and sun in the environment. Experiment and discover how your team of bots respond to changing conditions.
When you’re done, follow the link on your printed receipt to get a time-lapse video of your start-to-finish creation uploaded instantly to NRG’s YouTube.
“Everybody is having a blast with it. Fun, joy, excitement, when the kids walk away — you can tell they’ve had a really good time.”
- John Neukom, Brand Manager, NRG