Client: Invista/Antron

Overview

The Antron® Resource Center is a 3,000 square foot year-round product exhibit, conference center, and educational facility targeted to architects, interior designers and client end-users. It also functions as an office workspace for Antron product representatives.
For over 20 years, it has been cost-effectively transformed for each NeoCon tradeshow at Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. Each annual design solution is geared toward addressing Antron’s specific business goals and meeting the changing needs of the carpet fiber market.
For 2011, the design solution—an immersive, experiential space anchored by a sensory path—communicated Antron’s grasp of design, color, performance and sustainability.

Goals

This project aimed at telling the story of the process from fiber to carpet. It was also important to reinforce Antron’s position as a color and design leader, while still connecting to the First Life™ sustainability messaging established the prior year. The objective was to create an engaging, memorable and entertaining environment highlighting Antron’s four dimensions: color, texture, pattern and light reflectance.
The “In the Fiber” concept was derived as a way to make fiber tangible—to allow the product to come to life in the space and invite users to interact with it along a sensory path. Visitors experienced fiber as a prominent design component; more than 900 miles of it was elevated “off” the floor, serving as an interior architecture element sculpting and enveloping the space, replacing traditional walls. Technology, including a gradually changing lightscape, further animated the showroom, enabling customers to participate in the design of the actual space.
The gradually changing lightscape illuminated the space with bright—but soft—changing colors. Stations integrated along the sensory path included interactive walls, tables and floors that provided a playground for creative expression through movement, shifts of light and light reflectance.

Process

Perkins Will collaborated with Float4 Interactive to create this showroom focused on sensory imagination. While Perkins Will designed the experience, Float4 Interactive powered it by introducing the technology enabling users to simulate the application of paint to surfaces both virtually and in real time, by simple body movement and gestures.