What’s Your XOXO?
A participatory mobile experience at the inaugural XOXO arts and technology festival where attendees play a word-association game and a friendly robot provides a tactile takeaway.
Entirely funded by a kickstarter campaign, XOXO is a game-changing conference that celebrates the makers, the hackers, and thinkers that pursue disruptive creativity. With this project, we created an entirely democratic, participatory mobile experience that matched the crowd-sourced vision of the event.
One thing you can’t do when you’re trying to reflect the spirit of an open source event like XOXO: try to define it. That presents an immediate problem for the interaction designer: how do you solve a problem that can’t be defined? This question led us to a fantastically simple answer: we designed a tool to let the conference define itself.
Attendees play a word association game on a mobile app, allowing them to set up a string of words that starts with “XOXO” and ends with…whatever they want. A large sculptural projection surface dynamically displays the most popular responses accompanied by a series of generative motion graphics. As a souvenir of the experience, attendees are given a chance to “robotify” XOXO in the form of a custom temporary tattoo. Delivered by our robot mascot, participants apply their own tattoos and proudly sport their personalized definition of the conference.