The design behind HERE at CES 2018

Forget New Year’s Eve — tech aficionados from around the world will tell you that CES is the true party that kicks off the new year. Being what it is (the most important consumer technologies show on the planet), and attracting whom it attracts (the biggest players in the game as well as countless visitors), a year’s worth of planning is necessary for those coming to strut their tech stuff. 

This year at CES, we shared our vision for the Autonomous World with thousands. We created an interactive city of the future where all of our most important offerings – from IoT, to automation, to mobility – came to life.

It was a company-wide effort with each product team working internally and with various partners and agencies to create the media to tell their side of the HERE story.

Jay Grossen, our VP of design, was one of the people overseeing it all. When he joined HERE in July of last year, the teams were already well into their CES preparations and one of his first tasks was to work with them on their offerings, as well as connect with the internal and external teams responsible for the “booth” (don’t let the understated name fool you – it was big) where the story would be told.

His main aim: To work with all teams, to help create a singular experience around what HERE represents.

“Here is enabling the Autonomous World. We’ve got the technology, we’ve got data, we’ve got our sights set on this world where everything is thought through and everything works seamlessly,” he said.

“We know that particular utopia is going to take a long time to get here, but we imagine it and we have products that are going to get us there.”

This is where the “city of the future” inspiration was born, and each demo in the booth described in detail the solutions to get us there. Since our Open Location Platform is at the center of it all, that’s exactly where it featured in the booth. Countless hours of work went into fostering this big format of storytelling and making intangible things (like data) tangible.

The end result was a truly HERE-centric space where a chandelier of LED screens distributed visual streams of data to various areas in bright bursts of color and team members were able to tell the HERE story aided by an exhibition 365 days in the making.

“It truly showed the breadth of what we do, and it really felt like it came from one place,” said Jay. “People commented that we felt like a different kind of company from the rest. I heard over and over again that people didn’t realize how much more than maps we were until then.”