Booth Design: Size, Layout, and Theme

[David Artman]

...Ooookayyy. Maybe the third time's the charm--surely, I can't get booted out of my own topic....

Please feel free to post your thoughts, suggestions, and experiences with regards to the following elements of convention booth setup and design:

• Size; including percentage of space devoted to various booth functions.
• Layout, including clustering or scattering, sightlines, flow through the areas, and secured or unsecured areas.
• Theme, including co-branding, decorations, and ambient lights or sounds.

[David Artman]

Booting #1:
"shanty town of booths"... "shanty town of booths"... Why do I LOVE the sound of that, from an Indie sensability?

Why wouldn't this be possible? With enough advance commitment, couldn't "The Forge MetaBooth" be comprised of, say, ten actual booths [edit - I really meant something like "regions" or "areas," not "booths" as in separate groups trying to arrange to be contiguous. Basically, in short, just a bigger area than this year, with the same unity.], each with a "branding" banner of The Forge or Indie RPGs, but each focused on a particular subset of the games?

People could even self-select their grouping (using still-more fields in the database), up to a given maximum number of games per grouping. Or the subsets could be comprised as above, by "genre" (in an Indie context -or- in a traditional fictional context).

One could even, then, split out the booth cost responsibilities, so that the entire risk isn't being taken by the handful of folks who spearhead our relations with the con(s). Once ten (or whatever) folks commit to go, they are sharded off into their own booth to pay for, setup (with some co-branding help/requirements), and manage. [edit - Again, I did not intend them as separate Exhibitor entitiess, trying to get their own little booths to slam together and call them "The Forge"--I meant that each sub-group would handle their own setup, teardown, costs, and shanty town "style" to reflect their particular genre focus. Division of labor and risk, NOT division of the whole group into isolated GenCon-facing entities.]

By the way, this would not prevent the booths from appearing to be contiguous, nor would it prevent economies of scale (sharing demoers and print costs for con-specific marketing collateral; using a single register and stock area).

Hmmm.... or even if the sharding of the cost structure is unimportant, and The Forge will instead just increase its reserved floor space to accommodate flow and increased stock; could a "shanty town" still be considered, for aesthetics? I just like the image of a bunch of similar--but by NO means identical--little huts and stands of product all surrounding a "lawn" of demo tables, with an entrance gate (where the register would be) and crazy picket fencing and various "streetlights" and maybe a hot dog vendor or coffee cart and....

Worth considering?
David

[David Artman]

And a two and a....
As for the claim of "major $$", I'd say that's a matter for the commiting designers to decide. Get the database up soonish, and I suspect you'd get commitment from MANY folks to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. And if the issue is the whole "huts and shacks" sets, I doubt we'd have much trouble knocking together something sufficiently "shanty" out of insulating board, some MDF, paint, and normal shelving systems.

Yep, it's time to think about off site storage, then, too! ;)
[Edited for typoes and missing materials (paint).]

[David Artman]

I'd just like to point out that a few ideas are being clumped together in ways that (a) are not necessary and (b) were not proposed initially (that I have read). To whit:
1) The shanty town need not increase the booth size more than is already being considered for the anticipated 100+ game volume next year. It is merely a different organizing structure, themed a bit to pick up on the "garage, punk, shoestring budget" flavor of our type of indie productions.
2) Coupling individual costs to commitment and product volume levels is not identical to separating everyone into isolated mini booths.
3) Restructuring costs does not necessitate restructuring physical proximity.

In those three "points" lie about eight actual elements, each of which is mostly or entirely independent of the others.

That said, I think there's a lot of merit to James's points about perceived crowding and cluster. But do not, please, lose sight of it being perceived. I do not think it is a necessary truth that a larger booth will not appear "full and eager" or that the booth is a static construct that can't adjust as necessary to tune perceptions.

Even if one merely shifts free-standing curtains around, to close in or open up the area surrounding what the enclose, that can make for intimacy-on-the-fly. Or, abandoning the shanty town notion for more of a "maze" notion, sightlines across the booth space could be occluded by aisles, off-angle shelving, or more curtains/posters/walls. The last GenCon I attended, Wizards had a HUGE central area, with demo tables kicking off every fifteen minutes, with plenty of empty chairs and wide, walkable aisles (I cut through there routinely, to avoid the main aisle traffic). Did it ever seem "desolate" or like folks rattled around in it? Not to me, because the space was carefully divided off and screened, and they were clever about ringing the space with their most popular products, to create the appearance of crowding while interior spaces were all-but-empty.

What I believe would REALLY go wrong with up-sizing the booth is if the space was not fully leveraged or if a large portion of it was "inaccessible" to boothgoers. Every inch of the place should go to either sales, sales support, or demoing. As nice as a lounge area sounds, would it end up being a place demoers congregated when they should be out demoing or pushing for demos? Would sales folks retreat to that space, leaving punters unattended? Would boothgoers treat it like a "free" rest stop, with no interest in the games but only wanting to get off their feet on a comfy chair for a while? Biggest question: who would tell any of those above folks to shift it, and how, and after how long? Ick...

As for storage, I think anything that lets you stack to the sky is key: it would be IDEAL if the at-booth storage area was no more than the size of an upright filing cabinet or two, with restocks of the stock from hotel rooms. I saw that sketch of the booth this year, and I admit (even if not to scale) I was surprised that storage was almost the same size as all sales area. At the price of booth space--plus given how little of a hotel room is actually USED (especially at cons!), it seems a no-brainer to get as much stock into the rooms as can be done. One just has to always have a runner to grab more stock as the storage area runs out/low on a particular product. Conversely, you can, as much as is reasonable--some folks come WAY over prepared for their likely sales volumes--go with an "all stock on theshelves" policy, with a maximum and minimum stock level (say, no fewer than five copies of a product, no more than fifteen). Then, you don't need ANY storage area, but your runner for restock needs to be very watchful for the appearance of those "placeholder" laminate that show what would be on the shelf at that point, if it weren't out of stock.

Or.... hmmm... what if the storage area was one of those way-out, cheap-ass booths, with nothing but a locked cage of stock and directions tot he "main booth?" After all, if the central areas are coveted and valuable, while the edge of arena areas get almost no traffic, then leverage that cost differential and shift the unprofitable contents to the cost-effective space. Just a last second though before Posting.

But all that's practical, and we are still roaming the conceptual spaces, here. Perhaps there are resources or studies somewhere that talk about convention space setup, manipulating perceptions of spaces, traffic flow in crowds, and related stuff that could tell us, point-blank, whether its better to do a central sales area surrounded by demo tables or a central demo area with focused sales areas at each corner, or some maze-like flow-through pattern, or something totally different from what we've so far imagined?

The main elements *I* would like to champion are theming and proximity: what better way to say "we're fun" than the former, and what better way to say "we're BIG and here to STAY" than the latter?
David

[Gregor Hutton]

Hi David

Here's my two cents.

I want to kind of take stock of how the Forge booth at Gen Con was this year, comparing it with last year in my head and not rushing into any attempted solutions right away. So, personally, I'm not going to be rushing to any sudden ideas on this any time soon.

[TonyLB]

Flow through the purchase area (or rather the lack of such flow) is a key complaint in the feedback we've been receiving post-con.  I'd certainly like to fix that.

Now some of this is clearly that, in the interest of separating the sales from the demoes (a very worthy goal that did a great deal for year-over-year improvement) we left the sales area with basically one gateway to the outside world:  clients coming in were inherently conflicting with clients coming out, and both of them were bumping into the people already browsing.

We need a lot of surface area.  More surface area means more demoes (and, possibly, not having to climb over an occupied table in order to get to an open one), and more ability to interface with the aisles and the rest of the world.  The step up from a 4-booth peninsula to a 4-booth island looks like a chump bet if you think of it purely in terms of square footage (pay more for exactly the same floor-space?) but may be worth looking at in order to make the space we have more usable.