Freestyle photobooth

The digital space might not be exactly limitless but it's pretty vast. With the right creative drive and the right skill sets the boundaries can constantly be pushed. One of the biggest challenges facing digital agencies is how to showcase digital concepts and design work in a creative way.

Plasma screens and sleek white Macs are great for demonstrating to clients how concepts and designs will work in context but, setting these against creative work from non-digital arenas that have a physical presence that you can work with, it quickly becomes obvious that we need to find ways to be more creative with the way we showcase our work.

This was the inspiration behind our Photobooth concept at the recent Plus International Design Expo in Birmingham. We wanted something that would demonstrate to visitors our approach to interactivity within the evolving digital space.

In an age where it is fast becoming recognised that content is king, some of the most successful and widely used sites of the moment are based around user generated content. Sites like Flickr and Facebook need to be well designed and thought out – in fact their success relies in no small part to good design and usability – but the design element is minimal and certainly secondary to the content that is uploaded by the users.

Building the photobooth gave us the opportunity to showcase our work, and more importantly our approach, in an interesting way. The booth itself (in all it's low tech glory) is the blank canvas. The interface showcases our design and build skills but it's more about giving the user the opportunity to be creative in a fun, interactive way. Getting people to stick copies of their pictures on to the outside of the booth gives them the control over how it is shaped over the course of the Expo.

In retrospect we've learned a few things; some of them technical, others more about the way we present ourselves. Next time we try something like this, we'll know that it doesn't matter how much preparation you put into green screen work, it all comes down to how you react to the changing lighting conditions on the day.

Perhaps just as importantly though it was about us and the people who used the booth having fun. I'm sure that adding a box of dressing up gear and some cheesy music had as much to do with bringing in the crowds as it did with getting people interested. Certainly giving visitors something personalised to take away with them was a huge success.

Not to take anything away from any of the other exhibitors at the Expo who put together some very impressive and slick looking presences, but our low-tech, low-budget approach gave us a great platform to get people involved and start some interesting conversations that maybe didn't happen around some of the other stands. It just goes to show that although the design element is what you'll ultimately be judged on, the delivery method and the creative concept behind it is often just as important.

The next challenge is where we take it from here. We've certainly learned a lot from how people interacted with the booth and even more about working with green screens in flash. If we rebuild the booth it will definitely be booth 2.0 but above all the whole exercise has been a good reminder to stretch ourselves creatively and to think about how we present our work, not just the work itself.

www.fsnm.co.uk/photobooth

Send us your opinion on this by email to: ideas@fsnm.co.uk

Contact us

Freestyle Interactive Ltd

   Harwoods House, Banbury Road,
   Ashorne, Warwickshire CV35 0AA
Telephone: +44 (0)1926 652832
Fax: +44 (0)1926 651366
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