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design awards

	SILVER AWARD
	Category: Island - Less Than $150 per Square Foot Exhibitor: Herman Miller Inc. Design: Mauk Design Inc., San Francisco, 415-243-9277, www.maukdesign.com Fabrication: Czarnowski, Denver, 800-247-4302, www.czarnowski.com Show: NeoCon, 2008 Budget: $139,000 Size: 60-by-25 feet Cost/Square Foot: $93

hen Herman Miller Inc. wanted to show off three new products at NeoCon 2008 in Chicago, the company faced a dizzying challenge: How do you demonstrate a device that scatters background noise? And how do you get attendees to appreciate the nuances of light intensity put out by an LED lamp, or see the temperature changes brought on by a personal heating and cooling unit? Simple. You turn each in-booth display into an intriguing demo.

To show off its products, the company turned to San Francisco-based Mauk Design Inc., which designed an exhibit consisting of three product-display areas. Each area featured a custom-built structure of white fabric stretched over steel rods to form irregular boxy shapes. Those fabric structures served as stark backgrounds where materials, colors, and lights could be used to show how each product functioned.

For example, to display the C2 Climate Control unit, Herman Miller set 20 of the C2s on a shelf built into one long structure. Atop the shelf, the C2s blew air onto thermochromic film, a dark material that changes colors when exposed to heat or cold, thus coloring the niche with a rainbow of reds, greens, and blues depending on the devices' temperature settings.

To demonstrate the Babble, a gadget that randomizes background noise to make it unintelligible, a pair of Babbles were mounted on two white display columns. Blue and red dots of light on each column symbolized the difference between scattered and unscattered background noise.

The strategic use of color in the exhibit did not go unnoticed by the judges. "You've got tiny splashes of the Herman Miller red, and then you've got nothing but white, and the colors created by the thermochromic display," one judge said. "That makes the exhibit product-focused without being boring or stark for stark's sake." E

Brian Todd, staff writer; btodd@exhibitormagazine.com


			The Full Spectrum Set against an all-white exhibit for Herman Miller Inc., three product demos offered the only splashes of color, drawing attendees to the unique devices on display and using color to communicate how each product performed.