World of Whirlpool is a hands-on appliance experience in the heart of Chicago, IL. Intended to spread awareness about Whirlpool brands as well as their appliances, the location is a fun and interactive space where customers could try appliances out in person, or attend workshops from professionals.
World of Whirlpool is a hands-on brand experience in the heart of Chicago, designed to let consumers interact with Whirlpool appliances in person. The ask was to design an engaging, educational touchscreen game for the ground floor lobby, built around a 7-foot wall-mounted display, that could teach visitors how to optimally store everyday groceries in a Whirlpool refrigerator, while keeping the experience fun enough to draw people in off the showroom floor.
We started by studying how visitors actually moved through the space — where they paused, what drew their attention, and how long they engaged with existing installations. That informed both the scale of the experience and the interaction model. The game needed to educate without feeling like a lesson, so we explored multiple formats — tile puzzles, memory matching, food trivia — before landing on a mechanic that felt intuitive and replayable. In parallel, I led the development of a full game identity, including a name, logo, and a custom icon library of food illustrations designed to be whimsical, immediately readable on a large touchscreen, and capable of supporting subtle animations that elevated the overall feel.
The installation became the centerpiece of the World of Whirlpool showroom almost immediately after launch. What was designed as an engaging lobby activation turned into a fixture — one was still running on the showroom floor years later. That kind of longevity in a physical retail environment is rare, and it speaks to a design that was built to hold up both technically and experientially over the long haul.
Starting From a Floorplan
Before a single screen was designed, all we had was a floorplan, a rough outline of the space the installation would eventually live in. No hardware, no confirmed dimensions, just a footprint and a set of specs. That's where the thinking started. Rather than defaulting to a static information display, I saw an opportunity to do something more memorable: a game that could pull people in, teach them something useful, and leave them with a positive impression of the brand, all without a tutorial or a salesperson standing next to them explaining how it works.
Early concepting was grounded in the physical reality of the screen. A 7-foot capacitive touchscreen in a busy showroom lobby isn't a phone or a tablet — it demands big targets, forgiving interactions, and a visual language that reads from a distance. Sketches explored what kinds of game mechanics would feel natural at that scale, what would be too fiddly, and what could hold the attention of someone who hadn't planned on stopping. The goal from the start was to strike a balance between education, delight, and brand integrity, something that felt unmistakably Whirlpool, but also genuinely fun to play.
The blueprint that started it all — screen placement marked on the right.
Three Concepts, One Direction
Three game concepts were developed and evaluated before the team landed on a final direction. We chose the refrigerator as the hero product deliberately — the screen was positioned next to a kitchen showroom, and at 7 feet tall, it could credibly recreate a full-size fridge that visitors could interact with at a 1:1 scale. Each concept took a different approach to balancing education with entertainment:
- Puzzle & Quiz - A straightforward game walking players through the key features and storage zones of the refrigerator, one section at a time.
- Food Bytes - An arcade-inspired experience where players dropped 8-bit style food items onto the correct shelf before time ran out.
- Memory game - A card-matching game where players flipped tiles to pair fruits and vegetables, reinforcing food storage knowledge through repetition.
Ten Facts, One Game
From those facts, we found it made sense to show types of food and then ask the player to move it into the optimal storage location.
Immediate feedback — whether positive or corrective — kept players engaged throughout the experience.
Say Hello to OrganizeIt
The game needed an identity to match its ambition. After exploring options like "The Ultimate Organization Challenge" and "Keep Your Cool," the team landed on OrganizeIt — punchy, clear, and action-oriented in a way that telegraphed the experience before a single tile was touched.
The mechanic itself was equally straightforward: players drag food icons from a holding tray into the correct zone of the refrigerator, with each placement triggering a contextual tip that either confirmed the right answer or gently nudged toward it. Ten food facts guided each session from start to finish, wrapping up with a personalized result screen and score that gave players a reason to try again.
Bringing the Game to Life
With the core mechanic established, the next step was building out the assets that would give OrganizeIt its own character. I designed a logo rooted in Whirlpool's existing brand guidelines — familiar enough to feel at home in the showroom, distinct enough to stand on its own as a game identity. From there, a full icon set was created to represent every food item that could appear during gameplay, each illustrated to be whimsical, instantly recognizable at scale, and expressive enough to support subtle animations. Rounding out the system, data and fact cards were designed to surface in real time as players interacted with the game — reinforcing correct placements, redirecting wrong ones, and delivering bite-sized refrigerator tips that made every move feel like a small moment of discovery.
Examples of data cards that would pop up from start to finish.
Concepts of the OrganizeIt logo as it was being created.
An icon library that helped with driving the actions of the user.
Insight and Reflection
OrganizeIt became the centerpiece of the World of Whirlpool showroom not by accident, but because the design respected the context it was built for. Visitors who might have walked straight past the appliance suite stopped, played multiple rounds, and left with a genuine understanding of refrigerator organization — all while associating that experience directly with the Whirlpool brand. The game ran non-stop, and years later it's still running, which remains one of the more quietly satisfying outcomes of my career.
Looking back with fresh eyes, there are things I'd approach differently. I'd push harder for user testing earlier in the concepting phase — even informal observation sessions with people unfamiliar with the space would have sharpened the interaction model faster than internal iteration alone. I'd also explore a more robust feedback loop between the game's data and the broader showroom experience; ten food facts is a strong foundation, but a system that adapted to what players got right or wrong could have made each session feel genuinely personalized rather than sequential. And knowing what I know now about designing for physical installations, I'd advocate earlier for accessibility considerations — touch target sizing, contrast ratios, and interaction timing at that screen scale deserve their own design pass, not just a checkbox at the end.
What this project cemented for me is that the best interactive experiences don't feel like they're teaching you anything — they just make you curious enough to keep going. That's the standard I bring to every experience I design now.
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©2026 Kegan Flairty
Senior Product Designer