Change of Plans

The brief

Put Google’s products in people’s hands the way they’d really use them: across one ordinary day. Guests walked through doors from a laundry room to a home office, a garage, a marketplace, the outside of a house and finally the kitchen, finding at every step something their devices could do that they hadn’t thought of.

The build

I owned the physical build of the section, from design development through fabrication and on-site delivery, working directly with Google’s product, hardware and software teams. None of it was off the shelf. Every room had custom animatronic and hardware integrations: shades opening on cue, products presenting themselves on linear actuators, faucets turning on. Hidden cameras let narrators watch each group and adapt the story to them live. Everything else ran automatically.

The quality bar went all the way down. The marketplace had custom labels for more than 26 products, I flew in an illustrator to paint the signage on site, and every post on the cork bulletin board was fabricated. All six rooms were ADA compliant.

The hard part

Twenty-plus vendors, union labor and a fixed opening date, all on one show floor. On site, I resequenced vendors on the floor and moved lighting to overnight shifts while the floor was clear, so the day crews could keep building. I also made most of the operational calls that fell outside the design intent.

Outcome

More than 500 guests a day went through the 12-minute experience, with lines running two to three hours. I’ve worked with both Google and Deeplocal since.