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ESI Design Brings Home the Gold

By Ian Lewis Campbell
News, Awards, Events

The Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY. The media developed for this arena won Gold at the 2013 FCS Portfolio Awards.

ESI Design, Ogilvy Mather and Landor won the 2013 Financial Communications Society (FCS) Gold Award for Corporate Image and Event Marketing for the groundbreaking work at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

It was a great journey and rewarding to work with both Landor and Ogilvy Mather. The media makes a big splash in the heart of Brooklyn and provides the Barclays brand with a huge number of impressions everyday.

The revolutionary part of the media experience is the story. By focusing on the local area around the new arena, the creative team was able to grant a greater sense of place to the new addition. Both Barclays history and the history of the neighborhood are told through stunning graphics that guide a visitor from street to seat.

More great work for Barclays from the same team is in the pipeline. So hold your breath for next years’ FCS awards for a possible repeat victory.

The FCS Portfolio Awards and Gala took place on May 16. This evening is dedicated to bringing attention to great communications from the financial industry as well as raising money for the Race For Kids, a children’s health event.

Kimberly Mertz of Barclays was the main client. The creative team consisted of Creative Direcor, Gideon D’Arcangelo of ESI and Art Director Angela Greene of ESI. Debra Everett-Lane, writer at ESI, was also recognized for her work on the project. Paul Verga was the lead from Landor and from Ogilvy Mather, Peggy Tan was the head of the team. We look forward to our continued work together.

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SEGD at ESI

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Collaborative Design, News, Awards, Events

Michael Schneider speaks about the Dreamcube.

The night of May15 was a big one for us. The cheese platters came.

Two large cheese platters arrived for our Small Talks, Big Ideas evening. The Society for Environmental Graphic Design asked us to host the evening and we were happy to do so.

We always have a range of projects we want to talk about. For the evening with SEGD we went with a perennial favorite. The Dreamcube, the 2010 project for the Shanghai World Expo, was 40,000 square feet of integrated, interactive technology and media. Tech and Media Designer Michael Schneider walked our guests through the process and real world challenges of designing a project like this.

Ed Purver, also of the Tech and Media department, then introduced a daily application of the technology used and the lessons gleaned from the Dreamcube.
330 Hudson is a Beacon Capital Partners renovation project in lower Manhattan. For them, ESI is refreshing the lobby with an LED installation that displays striking visuals and relevant data. The application of how people interact with different types of technology is informing the decisions made for 330 Hudson’s lobby.

Community Retail at Scale

Gideon D’Arcangelo
By Gideon D’Arcangelo
Collaborative Design, News, Awards, Events, Technology and Media

This article was originally published in the Robin Report, Community Retail At Scale

It’s Not Just Good, It’s Good For Business

No one can argue with the benefits of scale when it comes to retail. Large-scale retailers provide deeper assortments at lower prices than their ma-and-pa competitors. But there’s a problem with all this scaling up. Mass-scale stores have become divorced from the communities where they sit. Most big-box retail stores look like they have been dropped in place by the mothership, and show little connection to where they are. All retail should have a sense of place. Now that we’re used to all those benefits of scale, customers yearn again for the relationships they had with their stores when they were owned and operated by their neighbors. Prediction: the next big wave in brick-and-mortar retail will combine the power of scale with the benefits of old-school mom-and-pop retail relationships. This is the transformation of big-box stores to come.

Whole Foods Shows the Way

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Q&A with Designer Michael Luck Schneider

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Collaborative Design, Design, Digital Signage, News, Awards, Events

The culmination of the Dreamcube journey was a theatre in the round in which audience actions changed the exterior look of the cube.

This article was originally published in Metropolis Magazine, Q&A with Michael Luck Schneider

At the upcoming Digital Signage Expo (February 26-28) in Las Vegas, there will be a lot of talk about integrating electronic media into the designed environment. On the 26th, at a full-day session called “New Design Directions: Dynamic Digital Environments,” Michael Luck Schneider, senior designer at ESI in New York will discuss, in some detail, the collaborative effort it took to create the Dream Cube in Shanghai. I asked him about how his global team worked together as they communicated between Cologne to Sydney to Beijing and points between; and the ways and means of systems design. In my previous interviews on the topic of media-rich environments, panelist Paul R. Levy, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Center City, talked about the use of digital media in the large-scale urban environment; Jeff Kovel, AIA, principal at Skylab Architecture in Portland, Oregon, discussed his firm’s experience in building Camp Victory for Nike. Here we dig down into ESI’s interactive spectacular, designed, as Schneider says, to “demonstrate the power of collaboration in shaping a more sustainable future.”

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Q&A with Robin Lewis and our Founder

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Collaborative Design, Design, News, Awards, Events

Ed Schlossberg founded ESI in 1977

This article was originally published in the Robin Report, Robin Lewis interviews Ed Schlossberg

Robin Lewis: What in the world was Best Buy thinking when they discontinued their Studio D and Escape small store concepts several years ago? You designed these neighborhood boutiques to customize these stores for specific niche demographics and lifestyles. What’s the backstory on this?

Ed Schlossberg: I had this idea in 1998 to do something called a Digital Playground. I thought if these technology companies were going to be successful, they needed to let people play using digital stuff so that they could see what would work. So I made a presentation to Brad Anderson who was CEO of Best Buy, and he said, ‘This is fantastic, we would love to do this.’ He hired us to design the first Digital Playground. It took some time to get it going. When Brad hired James Damien as their visual merchant, he was really excited about it, and we kind of became his team.
RL: What was the design strategy?

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COAP: The Future of Play

By Debra Everett-Lane
Play!
Children playing Chicken Run at COAP 2012

Technology is great at getting us connected, but also great at keeping us home.

We at ESI believe the future of play is more and more about large, collaborative, group experiences. We all crave true-life interactions and games are a great way to connect us through the power of play.  For the last few summers, ESI Design has been an enthusiastic partner in Come Out & Play (COAP) — a festival of original games that are designed to be played in public spaces, as well as to create a fun spectacle.

Live-action gaming is an incredibly fluid, often unpredictable way to encourage and study collaboration and communication in large groups. Games of this nature can be a little rough around the edges to allow for experimentation and rapid prototyping — and our designers love to create an experience based on assumptions and then see how those play out in the real world.

We usually create games for COAP, but this year we stepped up our involvement by organizing an entire Family Field Day to be held alongside the regular Field Day event, both because we saw some unmet needs and also because we wanted the chance to experiment a little. We worked closely with COAP organizers Greg Trefry and Nick Fortugno (among others) to coordinate the two events and to make sure they reached the right audience. Here’s how it went...

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Information's Beautiful Future

By Scott Miller
Technology and Media

The world is awash in data — environmental sensors, cell phone data, consumer purchasing habits, social media participation, traffic flows, medical histories. And like many designers, ESI has been excited about the opportunities coming out of the emerging field of data visualization, which can help the world make sense of Big Data flowing around us and inspire large-scale change.

Over the last few years, ESI’s visionary founder, Ed Schlossberg, has been in conversation with his alma mater, Columbia University, to enhance its design leadership by advancing the field of data visualization through interdisciplinary collaboration. 

On July 2, at the prestigious Aspen Ideas Festival, Ed was on deck to help announce the launch of the Advanced Data Visualization Project (ADVP) at Columbia University. The initiative, which is sponsored by Thomson Reuters and will be based out of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), will facilitate research into data visualization and its implications for academia and industry.

Ed, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and Mark Wigley, Dean of GSAPP, presented the vision of ADVP within a panel discussion titled ‘Information’s Beautiful Future’, moderated by James Powell, Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters.

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Come Out & Play Family Field Day 2012

By Scott Miller
Play!

On Saturday July 14th ESI Design hosted the inaugural Family Field Day as part of Come Out & Play 2012 on Governors Island. Each year gets bigger and bigger and is a great way for ESI’s Game Lab to create fun, transformative experiences that encourage collaboration and action. .

All of the Family Field Day games revolved around the theme of time travel with a massive ‘Time Travel Agency” acting as a central hub where participants signed up to receive their time travel itineraries prior to jetting off to play games like ‘Chicken Out’ in Babylonia, The Great Cupcakes Wars’ in the Middle Ages and Aliens vs. Zombies in the year 3 Billion AD!

Hundreds of families taking took part in eight different games, all of whom were safely transported back to 2012 before the end of the day.

Stay tuned for more event details and takeaways from chief time travel agents Debra Everett Lane and Pete Vigeant. In the interim, check out some pics on Flickr.

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The Current State of Interactive Documentary

By Miriam Simun
User Experience
The Interactive Documentary Bear 71

The Interactive Documentary Bear 71

What is the future of storytelling? 

This question is being asked a lot these days.  The availability of new tools and new media strategies have brought about many experiments in storytelling.  Whether incorporating social media, gaming, augmented reality, audience participation, or transmedia narratives, various elements are being pieced together in different ways to create new experiences.  I recently attended a two talks at MOMA about the current state of Interactive Documentaries — specifically, documentaries native to the web.

Part I of “A Field Guide to the Interactive Documentary,”  was hosted by Zach Wise, the multimedia producer responsible for much of the innovative work at The New York Times. The two projects Wise showed really stood out: Johnny Cash Project, which creates an ever evolving music video from over 250,000 (and counting) user contributions, and the NYT’s “A Year at War” project, which enables visitors to navigate their own journey through a breadth of video content, articles, and original documentation to learn about the stories of the U.S. military at war in Afghanistan. 

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Field Frogger: A Hoppin’ Good Time

Pete Vigeant
By Pete Vigeant
Play!
Field Frogger @ Come Out & Play SF

Field Frogger @ Come Out & Play SF, November 5, 2011

ESI’s Game Lab has been experimenting with public event-based gaming over the past two years. Our portfolio has grown to include over a dozen new and unique experiences that experiment with scale, narrative, behavior and technology augmentation.

We decided to bring Field Frogger—our most ambitious game yet—to debut at the Come Out & Play Festival in San Francisco this past month. The arcade game “Frogger” was released thirty years ago and still lives on today—on the Nintendo 3DS, iPhone and Android devices (among other platforms). Our designers were inspired by the original arcade game and spent two months imagining, testing and plotting an authentic real-world reenactment. The result was an amazingly fun and captivating event that has never been done before.

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