What if instructions and end product become one and the same?
Leo Burnett Toronto created fill-in-the-blank recipes printed with food-safe ink directly on cooking parchment paper for IKEA Canada's "Cook This Page" campaign.
You lay your ingredients over the illustrated outlines (sized to actual proportions, naturally), roll the whole thing up, and cook it. The recipe IS the cooking vessel. < Mind blown. >
What makes this idea inspiring for me is the way it completely collapses the distance between instruction and action. No separate recipe card to consult. No screen to smear with salmon hands. The medium and the message are literally the same object, and then you eat it.
Museum/exhibit/design folks, take note: this is exactly the kind of thinking we should be applying to interactive experiences. What if the instructions were the activity? What if the label was the exhibit? What if visitors didn't need to read about something before touching it, because the touching was already built into the reading? (I'm wondering about a hands-on science exhibit on edible paper ...)
All 12,500 parchment paper recipes for the "Cook This Page" campaign distributed across 18 Canadian IKEA locations were snatched up within hours. People grabbed those things because the format itself communicated "this will be fun and I can do this." Simply place ingredients here, roll, cook, and eat.
The other lesson worth emphasizing is that the "Cook This Page" idea went through multiple iterations: starting as dessert recipes on peel-away posters, then recipes on different cooking materials, before landing on the fill-in-the-blank parchment paper approach.
Prototyping your way to the right answer isn't just good exhibit development practice. It's apparently good marketing practice, too.
Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!
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