The Best Buy Pulse
Best Buy engaged ESI Design to re-envision the lobby experience of their corporate headquarters in Minneapolis. The existing space had been devoted to a “History Wall” that depicted pivotal moments in the company’s founding and growth. Our challenge was to envision an experience that would weave together Best Buy’s past, present, and future into an engaging experiential narrative.
Our concept – The Best Buy Pulse – is a network of screens and monitors throughout the building’s ground floor that aggregate real-time news and data about the company, its employees, and the physical space of the lobby itself. These data feeds were drawn from discrete exhibits throughout the space that focused on different aspects of Best Buy’s corporate culture and identity, history, leadership, employees, and customers.
As an Interaction Designer on the project, I collaborated with a team of Physical, Visual and Motion Graphics Designers on the initial concept for two of the Pulse’s main exhibits Best Buy World and Best Buy People. World included a large-scale, multi-touch map interface for employees visiting from around the world, which enabled them to access data about their stores and view tweets and internal message board posts from employees within their region or store. People injected a moment of conviviality into the inevitably hectic pace of a major corporate hub by inviting passersby to pause, play, or reflect in front of a series of interactive mirrors. This installation also tracked and reported the number of passersby in a given day (this was part of the data set made available to the Pulse), providing insight into the scale of visitor traffic
I contributed to the concepting and ideation of these two exhibits and assisted in the design of storyboards and mockups for each. I also collaborated with the team’s other Interaction Designer to create a series of video mirror prototypes in Processing (building off of my Particle Mirror project). In addition to demo-ing these prototypes for the Best Buy team in-person, we also created a short video of them in-situ, based on the physical design team’s elevation renderings.