Lenovo

Lenovo was promoting its Aura laptop range, which included AI processors. One event needed a moment and photo opportunity centered on Aura. A second event, aimed at gaming influencers and content creators, needed to frame AI as a creative collaborator. In both cases, the branding was abstract enough that the experience had to do the heavy lifting.

I worked as the creative technologist, producing concept options, aligning with account management, and then designing and building the chosen direction from scratch. My scope covered design, prototyping, development, and the hardware and software needed to make the activations work live.

The challenge was to communicate a complex technology clearly without making the interaction feel forced or intimidating. The work also had to stay on-brand, speak to a specific audience, and make the value of the NPU visible without faking the proof. For the music event, the interface needed to feel playful and approachable rather than like a music lesson.

For Aura, I built a facial-recognition interaction that detected people as they walked past an LED wall and displayed a personalised animated aura behind them. Multiple people could experience it at once, and the auras could overlap and combine. The processing was shown on the laptop powering the experience, so attendees could see the NPU doing the work.

For the music event, I built a browser-based interaction where users pressed buttons to play tones and the AI responded with its own generated tones. Notes were visualised with shapes and colours, which made the interface feel more alive and more inclusive for hearing-impaired users. The buttons were intentionally non-descript so the experience felt approachable rather than intimidating.

I created a handful of concepts for each event, worked closely with account managers, and then built the selected concept from scratch. The Aura experience was developed in Python using MediaPipe for face detection and displayed on an LED wall. The music interaction used the same stack, but extended into the physical interface with an Arduino wired by hand into a perspex casing.

I made the experience AI-driven so the product story was embedded in the interaction. I also chose to show the NPU processing directly, because the point was to prove the hardware was doing the work. Persistence and personalisation made the aura effect feel specific to each attendee, while the browser-based music interface let me support the event remotely and keep the interface visually polished.

The result was a pair of live experiences that turned abstract AI hardware into visible, interactive moments. The music interaction resonated strongly enough that the client asked for it to be expanded and brought back for a third event.