Yale CEID Holiday Party Activation

Location-Based | 1-Day Timeline

Yale's Center for Engineering Innovation and Design wanted a holiday treat! (Or rather, for their interior to become one.)

The Brief

The Yale's Center for Engineering Innovation and Design wanted something special for their holiday party that lived on the creative edge while being a non-religious holiday treat. My collaborator and I were given a 3D model of their building, two days, and encouragement to lean into the festive spirit.

The Idea

We discussed a few options, from a snowy landscape with an interactive yeti, to ice fishing, but nothing felt particularly cozy. That is, until I thought back to watching Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse as a little kid. There was a charming take on Danse Macabre featuring Mickey and Minnie as Hansel and Gretel that lives rent-free in my head. While that's not a holiday story per se, it reminded us of the coziest place to throw a holiday party: A gingerbread house!

The Plan

My collaborator and I had one day for creative concepting and one day for implementation, so we jumped right in.

While it would have been fun to projection map the entire CEID, we had to find a different way to engage with this concept that required a lower technological lift. We decided to use the screens throughout the building as Gingerbread Portals - if you looked through them, you'd see mirrored back to you the gingerbread version of the space around you, like a real gingerbread Looking Glass situation.

My mission was to translate basic shapes of the room into their confectionary counterpart.

Aren't these old magazine pages cute? (I'd bet my mom probably still has stacks and stacks of crafting magazines.)

The Problem

A one-day turnaround is a short timeline, but it limited us only in terms of how many assets we could create and how many surfaces we could cover! So as much as speed was a challenge, the creative problem was a little more subtle.

Generative AI delivered some excellent concepts, but we needed to hone in on specific shapes and volumes to focus on for modeling, without changing the room's architecture.

We isolated a few furniture elements in more specific sketches, and decided where to place icing seams in the rooms. Essentially, where AI got the vibe right, we honed in on specific details for our next step. Doing so helped us prioritize reusable shapes for a kind of design system.

My collaborator and I both work in ZBrush often, but this is where they took the reigns on day two, throwing in a few finishing touches of their own!

The Product

If you know one thing about New Haven architecture, let it be that they love their Brutalism. But for at least one evening, the engineering students at Yale got to reflect on their year in a slightly sweeter way.