The time we designed a phenomenon
Escape Rooms, a London park in the middle of an office and secret product launches… all designed and built in under a month.
“We’d like to offer some spectacular for our Nordic customers, people who make incredible learning happen every day with our laptops and other technology… What ideas do you have…?”
The brief came in early December six years ago, over the phone, while I was on the way back from LEGO in Denmark. We’d thrown a few ideas into conversation earlier that year, and now they had agreement from the big bosses that we could get the budget to design an experience for about 400 people over the course of three days.
That gave us five working weeks to design, build and deliver a magical experience that would blow the socks off participants, and show just how powerful modestly priced hardware (and mostly free software) could be in creating memorable learning.
And five years ago today, that’s what we did.
The Escape Rooms were a mad idea from the start. We imagined four escape rooms, next to each other but soundproofed. Participants would have up to 60 minutes to escape them by using every trick in the book, and all the educational technology we could throw at it.
Lise spent her winter break to the Spanish islands thinking through every possible if-this-then-that on a spreadsheet that defied anyone’s logic other than her own. We wanted participants to start from a blank slate, quickly find their first clue, move on to collaboration with someone in a neighbouring escape room, use the technology the firm produced to research quickly, to learn about London, to unlock the door and escape.
We had four rooms: Green, Blue, Red, Yellow. In Edinburgh, we researched over 150 ideas for each room, and then designed each one to ensure that it would actually work, and let someone out the room. We had to work it out in theory, create an incredibly bizarre shopping list of highly specifically coloured items, and then test it out for real, from a series of boxes on the office floor.
Our experience design partners helped with the logistics of finding the gear in the right colour, designing the rooms that would take it, and making sure we could strip the whole lot down without costing the environment too much — the office had to return to its usual function by Monday morning.
We also rigged up CCTV in each room, allowing our team to give participants clues when they obviously needed it, and to make sure they didn’t destroy a space that would have to last a full three days.
We hired an incredible team of performers to cheer them on, be their best mates for the day as they went from one experience to another. They were Red Bull personified. Perfect for the job of taking senior educational leaders through their paces with a smile on their faces.
And we did indeed build a London park on a whole floor of a downtown office block. Participants used the brand new Jamboard from Google to collaborate from opposite ends of the park on a shared quest, while having a picnic or reading a paper on a park bench.
Ideas come quickly. Great ideas take time to build out, test and get into action. We did this and were packed up on our way home, all within a couple of months. But the ideas live on, replicated around the world by other providers for this firm (and others!)
Project Client: Major Technology Company
Location: London
Participants: Senior education officials from across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland.
Project Design: Ewan McIntosh, Lise Galuga
Project Delivery: Team Slice (Engine Group)
Project Facilitation: Ewan McIntosh, Lise Galuga, Ian Stuart, Malie Watson
