Conference creative technology
Two interactive builds for Strategy World, a venue map kiosk and a brand-mascot browser game, that turned conference touchpoints into things people actually wanted to use.
Conferences are full of screens nobody looks at. The brief from the events team was simple: don’t make more of those.
I designed and built two pieces of creative tech for Strategy World that did the opposite. Interfaces attendees actively chose to interact with, both serving real purposes underneath the play.
Interactive venue map kiosk
The convention floor was large enough that wayfinding was a genuine problem, and printed maps on easels weren’t going to work for the scale or the brand. I built a touchscreen kiosk running a custom cyberpunk-styled venue map. CSV and JSON pipelines fed live session data, room status, and speaker info into the map in real time. The same kiosk that helped someone find the bathroom also told them which keynote was starting in eight minutes.
The visual language matched the conference identity exactly. Orange-on-near-black, high-contrast type, no gradients, no decorative chrome. It read as part of the event design rather than a vendor’s UI dropped into the venue.
Maxi Runner
The second piece was a browser game built around Maxi, the honey badger mascot from the Bitcoin treasury campaign. Vanilla HTML5 canvas, no framework, deliberately tiny so it could be embedded in conference signage and shared as a link.
The mechanic is straightforward (an endless runner where you dodge obstacles and collect Bitcoin), but the craft is in the details. Cinematic-realism backgrounds, particle effects tuned for the brand palette, responsive on phones and kiosks alike.
The game was well received at the conference. Attendees played it on their phones during downtime and shared it on social. There was no integrated leaderboard or badge tie-in, that’s a candidate for a future iteration, but the standalone version did its job: a brand surface people actively wanted to engage with.
Why this work matters
Both projects were arguments. The map kiosk argued that wayfinding could be a brand surface, not a service afterthought. Maxi Runner argued that a B2B enterprise software conference could ship a playable game and still be taken seriously. Both arguments landed.
It also matters that I built them. A creative director who specs interactive work and hands it to engineers gets a different result than one who can write the canvas loop themselves. The fidelity of the final output was higher because the design and the implementation were the same person making the same decisions.