Lutz Vogel

Role:
Creative Director
Director
Art Director
Designer

An interactive installation showroom, bringing Samsung appliances to life in stores across the U.S. and Europe

As Creative Director my responsibility was to create and establish a look that makes CenterStage feel unexpected, exciting and memorable.

My responsibilities expanded to direct the experience and UI design, direct the product shoot in Seoul / Korea as well as the VFX / animation at Method studios.

Produced by The Barbarian Group.

Design process

I started by designing surreal moments around these household appliances – clothes tumbling in mid air, gigantic bubbles bursting – to create these little magical moments of surprise and wonder. Connected with the space and the physical appliances, it’s looking oddly familiar yet surreal – reality with a twist.

It was a requirement to show the appliances in life size, and on screen at all times. We had limitations as to what these devices could do, like, flying washing machines was out of the question. Besides the technical challenges (3d render times) it just pushes it too far. So instead I looked into how things could happen around these devices, and how the environment reacts to them. The carpet that turns into the mountainous terrain (vacuum cleaner) is a good example for that.

On another note, the real estate of the screens really allowed room for these surprising moments – you’re looking at a wall, not just a small TV screen. So bit by bit, I continued to look for metaphors that applied to each product category, while keeping in mind a holistic look and feel that kept everything together, for example overall space and lighting.

Pairing visuals with features of a product was possibly the most challenging process as I had to understand exactly how these products work. This was surprisingly important, I learned the differences in stronger short-term vs long-term suction in vacuums… the difference as it turns out would mean that I couldn’t use a certain metaphor – it wouldn’t portray the feature correctly. So finding the right balance was key – you didn’t want to be too abstract nor too literal either.

Another challenge was the fact that we had to target two audiences: The driver, who is standing in front of the UHD and interacting with the experience, and the people further back, the audience. We have to feed the main user more details, and show him information that’s in his field of vision – why we resorted to closeup infographics here. The audience, however, is standing too far away to see these details, and we basically use these grander animations to capture their curiosity and to entertain them. The result was that we catered for both.

UI/UX

UI/UX had some interesting challenges. It had to be engaging and playful and at the same time as straightforward as ATM machines. Considering a wider audience, the result is a clean, grid-based, color coded layout with clear iconography and typography.

The navigation through the different appliance categories happens through an elastic radial menu that expands and contracts, while additional, interactive information elements are enhanced with animations.