The DSM Biomedical AAOS (American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons) booth is representative of a lot of booths I designed while at Group Delphi. They were mid-budget, meaning the booths were made up of mostly rental properties with some custom elements.
For these mid-tier booths, I work together with account and detailing teams to determine the low, mid, and high-cost budgets.
For the high and mid-tiers, I sketch or quick model the custom elements I'm imagining and review them with the detailing and account teams.
For the low-end, I choose rental properties from Group Delphi's catalog for the structure, tables, desks, signage, and furniture in the booth.
In practice, we end up blending the two options to create a partial-custom booth.
I, along with detailing and accounting determine which of my ideas will fit with the client's wants (which are usually a lot) and with their budgets (which are usually a lot less). I often spend days or weeks with these two groups (depending on time budgeted) to find the sweet spot of great customed designed elements and budget. By directly working with fabrication teams we find lower-cost solutions to my custom elements.
This back and forth process takes the majority of my time in designing a booth. The trick to getting this done faster is to have a good relationship with the account and detailing teams and repurposing older concepts, building upon them because their budget is already estimated. Another trick I used is to send interesting concepts I find online or in real life to the estimators and ask hypothetically how we could recreate something like it in a future booth; I prefer to start the estimating process before I use it in a design.
This booth has rental storage, reception desk, tables, chairs, cabinets, monitors, and flooring. The main custom element is the beams around the demo stations. They are altered rental beams with custom-sized graphics held up with a custom support beam. These beam structures were the most simple out of the three options I presented. These were chosen because of the ease of cable management for the monitors (cables are hidden inside the open beams), the low cost to alter our rental beams, and it created cohesion between the demos even though they have different colored graphics on all sides.
The other semi-custom element is the buy-out LED half walls. They offer privacy without closing off the small foot-print booth and offer graphic opportunities.
DSM Biomedical AAOS 2020 at Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Flordia. Group Delphi 2019
