Design for conferences

A screen forgives you. An event does not.

On a screen, if the hierarchy's a little off, someone squints and figures it out. On a conference floor, "a little off" means they're already gone. And every booth around you is making the same bet: a banner, a backlit logo, a bowl of branded mints, a QR code nobody scans. Sameness is the default setting of a conference floor.

So the question was never "how do we decorate a booth." It was: what would make someone skip their next meeting to come stand with us?

We built a climbing wall.

We did Token2049 with a climbing wall. Not a stunt, the pitch made physical. The whole idea of the company is getting exposure to something hard and infrastructural without having to haul it yourself. So: a wall you climb, a reward at the top, and you didn't build the mountain. The experience was the metaphor. Anyone who climbed it understood what we did before we said a word.

That's the move I'd take anywhere. Don't advertise the company at the booth, make the booth be the company. The differentiator isn't a louder banner; it's giving people something to do that only your company could have built. Sameness comes from decorating a space. Standing out comes from turning the space into the product.

Because the design isn't the artifact, it's the behavior: where people stop, what they film without being asked. A booth that gets filmed keeps working after the floor empties out. Every climb became someone else's story on someone else's feed.

It worked. People queued. People filmed it. People who'd never heard the word "tokenization" climbed a wall and then asked what we did, exactly backwards from how a booth is supposed to work, and exactly right.

Don't decorate the space. Turn it into the product.