The 40x40 Project

A call came in just before the holidays. The timeline was tight (about 90 days), and the event was in Saudi Arabia. The request: a 40x40 booth. Not nothing, but not unusual either. We were in the middle of concepting booths for our spring events, so it felt doable.

We jumped into a discovery call to get a better sense of what they needed. The first addition was a theater space for presentations. Great, we’ve done that before. A little more complex, but still pretty standard.

Then came the next layer. They wanted it to be two stories, with meeting rooms upstairs. Ambitious, but still within reach.

At this point, I’m starting to picture how all of this fits together, and it’s feeling tight, like trying to design a tiny home where every inch has to work overtime. And then it hit us. The booth wasn’t 40x40 feet. It was 40x40 meters. (Which, if you’re not doing that math in your head, myself included, is roughly 131 by 131 feet. Over 17,000 square feet.)

At that point, it stopped being a booth. It started being something else entirely.

Once we understood the actual scale, everything about our approach changed. We weren’t trying to fit pieces into a footprint anymore. We were thinking about how people would move through the space and what they would experience along the way.

In partnership with Skyline Whitespace, we landed on the idea of a Smart City.

Each tower represented one of our core industry verticals. On the outside, we used tablets to bring those industries to life through customer stories, video case studies, and real examples. Inside each tower, we tied in custom swag aligned to that industry, so there was something tangible to take with you.

We also didn’t want people wandering without direction, because that’s exactly what happens in spaces this big. So we leaned into a bit of nostalgia. Guests were handed a postcard when they arrived that doubled as a map, complete with our own version of a not-so-yellow brick road guiding them through the “city.”

At the center was a theater on the ground level that anchored everything with presentations and live sessions. Upstairs, the energy shifted. It was quieter, more intentional, designed for conversations that could go a bit deeper.

What I loved most about this project was how quickly it forced a shift in thinking.

It would have been easy to treat it like an oversized booth. Add more signage, scale up the same ideas, call it a day. But once we realized what we were actually working with, the question changed. Not how do we fill the space, but how do we make it feel intentional.

In the end, it became less about square footage and more about flow, storytelling, and giving people a reason to explore.

And moving forward, I will never forget to check the unit of measurement first.