Guerilla Marketing at the Maker Faire

Due to our recent move, we didn’t have time to put together a display for the Maker Faire this year. However, since we are going, we decided we could still make something fun, and do a little guerrilla marketing at the same time – BONUS! But what to do? It had to be something cool, and at least a little bit fun/interactive, and in the spirit of the Maker Faire.

We’ve had an original design for a fold up dodecahedron (12 sided die) lying around for a while now waiting to be put to use. It’s a great item for stuff like this because people get to pick it up, play with it, and put it together. It goes together without glue/tape/fasteners, so you can finish it pretty much wherever you pick it up, and when assembled, it is fairly sturdy even on light cover stocks.

One of the biggest problems at the Maker Faire is the question of “What do I see next?” Even if you are a veteran of Faire’s past, it can be a daunting task to decide where to go next. So, we had a die design, and a problem to solve. The event map was not available yet, so the names of stages and pavilions were unknown, and we don’t want to put specific talks on them because they would go out of date too quickly. So we picked some of the best known installations and demos we could find that covered different areas of the fairgrounds.

And viola, we have the Unofficial Maker Faire Decision Engine. Of course, it is marketing, so it has to link back to us somehow. Taking up a whole face seemed tacky, so we added the website to one of the primary tabs along with the instructions.

A few making-of videos: