Interview about Steel City Tradeshow Highlight, winner of the A' Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design Award 2020
The Steel City is a stylized model depicting the steelworks of the future. It consists of semi-transparent acrylic models placed on a led-wall, which serves as a screen for demonstrating various use-cases by literally making the Steel City glow: when selecting one of the scenarios at the terminals, users trigger animations which visualize the processes and work-flows of the steel plant in a firework of light and color projected through the acrylic models on top. The whole experience is extended by a professional layer of information, accessed at the terminals via a unique haptic interface.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsFrom the start, this project was about "explaining very complex topics around operating steel plants". Since we had to try to use digital content to explain everything, we decided to make the steel plant itself the physical part of the installation. All the products and services of our client, that help the operations in and around a steel plant, happen "under the surface". Therefore we literally placed them under the physical model.
We wanted the specialists of our client, that did all the explaining to the visitors of the exhibition to be able to fully focus on the visitors. Therefore we needed an interface, that they could literally operate without looking at it. With this rotary knob, for which we were able to create programmable and changing haptic feedback, we gave them an interface they could operate without looking at it.
Since everything was designed and developed as a real-time visualisation we were able to freely combine different topics simultaneously. This way, the Steel City always showed 4 different scenarios at the same time, optimized for the different perspective of the 4 interactive touchpoints. By doing so, everybody around the installation could always catch a glimpse of the high degree of complexity that comes with operating a steel plant. This presented the perfect foundation for our client to communicate their expertise and know-how in this field.
Our client Primetals Technologies calls themselves pioneers at heart. Being a pioneer is all about taking different view angles. The mirror does this very thing. By making it a black mirror, its reflective surface just showed the light communication from the Steel City below it, isolated this parts of the installation and this way provided a nice aesthetic view.
Honestly, this part was by far the biggest portion of this whole project. Taking in a whole lot of details, high complexity of arguments and USPs led to a big chunk of content, that wanted to be communicated. We needed to find a way to boil it down to be able to create an experience oriented installation. Judging from the feedback, we succeeded in doing that.
It is an interface that got developed by an Austrian startup for the automotive industry. We stumbled over it almost per accident during our research of haptic interfaces. We reached out to that startup and were able to get our hands on some prototypes. Even the final installation did run on those prototypical devices.
On tradeshows it is always also about the WOW-effect that you can create. You need to do so to draw necessary attention. But once you have it, you need to fulfill your grab for the users attention by following it up with a worthy experience. In the setting of a B2B tradeshow, this experience also needs to have a certain amount of professional content delivery built in.
The scale of the LED wall basically came naturally in proportion to the size of the full exhibition stand. The installation of the Steel City needed to be big enough to show its significance and it was not allow to become too big and overstate its importance.
We needed to go simple. That was the main goal. Soon we found out, that we need and want to show around 4 scenarios at the same time all the time. Therefore we needed to introduce some sort of color coding. The decisions happened step by step and in hindsight feel all logical.
It's just a great tap on the backs of everybody who was involved in this challenging project. It let's everybody of the project team know, that they did a tremendous job and that they created something worth an award like this.
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