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Zippy digital installations: The making of

See how we transformed Zippy Kidswear's digital display. We designed & built two interactive installations. Dalziel & Pow, a leading retail design agency.

Dalziel & Pow
By Dalziel & Pow
Posted 06. 01. 2015
Zippy digital making of

For the new Zippy kidswear store in Setúbal, Portugal we designed two interactive installations and built both in-house at D&P.

The ‘Sound Poster’ is a screen-printed panel that uses conductive ink to trigger sounds from the printed characters, and the ‘Fun Receipt’ is a receipt for kids, which prints out of a giant mouth on the cash desk and includes characters to colour in, mazes and other games.

Design

The characters that featured throughout the store on walls, graphics and bags also became part of our installations, featuring on the Sound Poster as the trigger points for sound, and on the Fun Receipts as part of the printed content. The graphics, interiors and digital departments worked closely together to make sure the installations were in keeping with the brand and store design, and met functional and hardware restrictions.

Sound poster

Prototyping and build

As these were unique installations that would require a custom build, we had to research and prototype how to go about building them. For the Sound Poster we needed to test the conductive ink, see how effective it was with non-conductive paint layered on top and research what type of material to print on. We also needed to look at how we would store the sounds and provide variation for the user to keep them engaged. In the end we used the Ototo board – a small electronics board that uses human touch to play sounds. We worked with the guys at Dentaku to customise the Ototo board to make it play the sounds we found for our characters.

Zippy test sound poster

For the Fun Receipt we had originally scoped the solution using the Berg Little printer for Business, but when Berg announced the end of the Little Printer API in September we needed to find another alternative. In the end we created our own bespoke solution using a RaspberryPi and a Thermal printer. Big thanks to @andy_huntingdon for all his help with this. We also had to work out an integrated solution for successfully tearing off the receipts and prevent them from getting stuck behind the till. We made foam board prototypes to test before designing an MDF box to hold everything in place. This was cleverly fixed into position behind the till via magnets.

Zippy fun receipt prototype

Installation

We flew out to Setúbal to set up the installations while the Zippy store was being fitted. We worked with Zippy’s technicians to position and install both interactive installations. Check out the videos below to see us testing in store.

Zippy sound poster install
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NEWS setubal zippy generalimage05
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