"Live, everything has to work"

Expodata: Stefan Ingold, what moves you most in live communication at the moment?

Stefan Ingold: Personally, I find live communication at trade fairs and events one of the most exciting fields. Meeting people and inspiring them is a great thing. Live everything has to work, you don't have a second chance. It's a challenge. I would like to see more innovation among trade show organizers. It can't be that some organizers are only tackling issues like digitalization now, after many have the knife on their necks. For our company, the interface of staging and digitization is our focus topic. Here, keywords such as interaction, NFC Near Field Communication and augmented realities and virtual realities (AR and VR) in brand staging are our research topics.

But one critical booth builder says the booth is overrated for trade show success. What do you say?

That's right, the content and how I convey it is decisive. We must manage to arouse the curiosity of the trade fair visitors. After that, it should also be possible to inspire the visitor with a well-trained and motivated stand staff.

How do you define a brand experience?

When we manage to inspire third parties about a brand. When the participants become fans.

Form says the key to success is innovation. How do you get there?

Our roots go back 105 years. As a company, that's a very long time horizon. In that time, we have gone from being a cliché producer to a modern stager. Such a transformation is only possible through innovation. We take great pleasure in combining new production possibilities, means of communication, hardware and software with our ideas to create new concepts. This all happens in-house, is fun and brings each individual further.

What must digital transformation do for trade fairs and events - and what can it not do?

Digitization has long since arrived in many industries. So it's only a matter of course that it's finally making its way into trade shows as well. Visiting a trade show starts as an event long before the doors open and hopefully doesn't end for a long time afterwards.
At Form we have hardware such as large-volume 3D printers, milling robots, various digital printing and CNC machines. A research project is underway with the University of Fribourg on inkjet printing on industrial robots. This will give us the possibility to print three-dimensional bodies directly. In the area of software, 3D, mapping, rendering, databases, image recognition and so on are in our focus. The diversity of the different professions at Form helps us a lot. However, this can only be realized with motivated, well-trained employees. The desire to discover new things is our DNA.

Form stages 125 Swisscom stores anew every month. How is innovation expressed here in contrast to the historical "backdrop pushing" in the store and at trade fairs?

Of course, it's crazy to be able to stage your themes in the stores for such a customer every month. These are no longer backdrops, but different, sometimes complex themes that are staged coherently. In addition, there are factors such as the tightest time intervals, budgetary constraints and spatial components. Each store is unique in its execution. The play areas are different in language, area, number and design. For this purpose, we have programmed our own tool called Shopper. In the Shopper, all play areas are recorded. All production quantities can be seen there. Even when loading the 20 teams, the Shopper on the cell phone helps with the tour planning tool to ensure that the decorator loads the right material using QR codes. In this way, 125 stores are staged and documented exactly according to specifications, and the customer can see live in the shopper that everything is running flawlessly.

Is it true that 3D printing is only suitable for prototypes, but not for mass production?

The possibilities in 3D printing are fantastic! Speed and material versatility will increase a lot. This will bring the big market breakthrough. Together with a partner, we sell various 3D printers. There are design templates that can only be implemented with these systems. However, these 3D printers are only in the start-up phase. Comparably, when we bought the first digital printing machine 25 years ago, we were also smiled at. Today it is standard. The same thing happened to us with the digital photo studio.

Please finish the following sentence: "After the digital transformation, trade fairs/events...

... have an impact from invitation to post-processing."