An inflatable interactive installation built for a 10th anniversary activation — a public venting machine that translated a digital game mechanic into a physical act, and paid people in prizes for doing it.
The franchise is built on a single, universally understood mechanic: you are frustrated, and you get to launch that frustration at something. The brief was to take that mechanic out of the phone and put it on a sidewalk — a machine the public could walk up to, hit, and be rewarded by, with no instructions and no onboarding.
That framing set the constraints. The installation had to survive continuous public interaction in a high-traffic plaza, read as the brand from across the street, ship and inflate on site, and deliver a physical prize on every successful interaction. The design work covered the cabinet architecture, the interaction moment itself, the prize delivery mechanism, and the family of prize objects it dispensed.
Disciplines
Study
Public activations fail in a specific way: people understand that something is happening, cannot tell what they are supposed to do, and keep walking. Signage does not fix it — nobody reads a panel on the way past. The form has to carry the instruction.
So the study focused on making the interaction legible through geometry and light alone. Where does the hand go? What tells you it worked? What signals that a prize is coming, and from where? Every one of those answers had to be visible before a person committed to walking over.
Strategy
Rather than apply graphics to a generic box, the cabinet borrows the character's own vocabulary: tail feathers crowning the top edge, a dot-relief surface across the face, and a saturated red body with deep corner radii. Recognition happens at distance, before any logo is legible.
Layout studies weighed a framed display against a zoned pad arrangement, both edge-lit so the screen reads in daylight. The hit port was then treated as the single focal element — recessed, ringed in light, and positioned at the height where a person naturally strikes. An illuminated prize door below it closes the loop, so the reward appears where the eye already is.
Cabinet concept — 01
Cabinet concept — 01 front
Cabinet concept — 04
Cabinet concept — 04 front
Layout studies — zoning
Exploded construction
Hit sequence — interaction
Prize door — mechanism
Prize product — pool toy
Prize product — float
Prize product — bands
Prize product — wrap
Result
The machine deployed as an inflatable structure carrying a rigid interaction core — light enough to ship and stand up on site, robust enough to absorb continuous public use. Character geometry does the brand work at distance, edge-lit graphics hold up in daylight, and the lit hit port and prize door read as a single obvious loop: strike here, collect there. No instructions required.
Outcomes
Technology
Subsystems
Details