With the seemingly incessant clutter in our lives, Marie Kondo has emerged a new star to streamline our lives by decluttering. While this sounds like it’s something only applicable to our homes, there are multiple applications in trade show booth design. The KonMari Method is evidenced by great trade show booth design in the following ways:
Visualize the Destination
At the beginning of any Marie Kondo session, she asks people to visualize the destination- where they want to be at the end of the process. This is helpful to trade show booth design because it gives designers insight into what customers want out of a design. It also helps companies to narrow what the vision of success at a trade show will look like. This vision could be different for different companies so by providing this initial visualization of what success looks like, the trade show booth design can work to support this visualization.
Great Trade Show Booth Design is About Evoking Emotion
One of the top rules to the KonMari Method is to only keep items that inspire joy. What this teaches us about trade show booth design is that the items you incorporate into the design should only be there if they evoke an emotion. Typically, companies would want to evoke a sense of excitement about their products, a sense of urgency, or a sense of calmness and being well taken care of. No matter the emotion your company would want to evoke, there is a trade show booth design principle at play here. By keeping only the items in the design that work to accomplish that goal, companies are better able to reach their desired customers at a trade show.
Discard Before Putting Things in their Proper Place
Once Marie Kondo has begun a session, she asks homeowners to discard items prior to placing anything back in its proper place. This is a great rule of thumb for trade show booth design because often, customers want every doodad and widget in their trade show booth design without realizing how cluttered it can make the design feel. Borrowing inspiration from Marie Kondo, it’s a great idea to choose the less is more approach and discard some of these cluttered ideas prior to putting it all into a trade show booth design.
Place Things In Neat Containers
One of the principles of the KonMari Method is that once you tidy up, you place things in their proper containers so you can see the items and have a relationship with your belongings. This is a great principle for trade show booth design because when companies are showing products, they need to show them in a neat and organized way. Haphazard products strewn around the trade show booth are ugly and don’t encourage people to interact with them. Instead, by incorporating product demonstration areas into trade show booth design, companies can show off their products in a manner conducive to selling these products.
The KonMari Method may seem like it’s only about arranging our homes, but it’s also about arranging our lives and ourselves. This is a great lesson for trade show booth design because that’s about presentation of the brand to others. By taking cues from Marie Kondo, we are able to develop a trade show booth design that lends order to the brand and presents it in its best possible light.
