Successful products anticipate needs before we feel them. Before IdeaPaint, who knew a child’s enthusiasm for writing on the wall survives into adulthood? Who guessed that being able to jot down a note or sketch a diagram on any surface would become an important feature of workplace design? As more and more offices turn walls into sketchbooks, the concept of making every surface a platform for expression turns work environments into idea incubators.
Successful products anticipate needs before we feel them. Before IdeaPaint, who knew a child’s enthusiasm for writing on the wall survives into adulthood? Who guessed that being able to jot down a note or sketch a diagram on any surface would become an important feature of workplace design? As more and more offices turn walls into sketchbooks, the concept of making every surface a platform for expression turns work environments into idea incubators.
City Chicago, IL
Year 2016
Size 850 sf
Team Primo Orpilla, Mina Azarnoosh, Joseph Rodriguez, Donald Koide, Elizabeth Vereker, Colleen Masusako
Photographer Jasper Sanidad
For NeoCon 2016 IdeaPaint partnered with Happier Camper to demonstrate the boundless potential of writable surfaces and hired O+A to design an exhibit that would dramatize the product’s broad reach. Seizing on two elements of IdeaPaint’s marketing—the word “boundless” and the idea of a mobile office (dubbed “Think Tank”)—our designers created spaces at two locations in the Chicago Merchandise Mart that captured in bright colors and vivid graphics the free spirit of a camper on the open road and the power of a mind released from boundaries.
With every part of the camper writeable, O+A created a series of wall graphics to suggest the various landscapes—a mountain campus, a dense cityscape—into which this office-on-the-go might roll. At each location, adjustable whiteboards designed for IdeaPaint by Primo Orpilla turned campsite into a conference room. Even the open air, it seems, can be made into a writeable surface.