2020 SEGD Arrow Award Winner, 22MILES
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2020 SEGD Arrow Award | 22MILES
The SEGD Arrow Award recognizes exemplary service or dedication to advancing technologies and manufacturing in experiential graphic design and striving to provide the highest quality in products and services to the field. Recipients of the SEGD Arrow Award have advanced new manufacturing processes, led the development of innovative new products, and championed sustainable practices and materials. Past winners include SH Immersive Environments, 3M, Neiman & Company, CREO Industrial Arts, Matthews Paint, and Nova Polymers.
Formed in 2007, 22MILES is an award-winning software solution provider specializing in immersive digital signage and interactive wayfinding experiences. Because of their intuitive propriety CMS, the company Is a leading provider for projects that include 3D wayfinding, 4K video walls, mobile indoor positioning, dynamic signage and more for clients like Westfield, Astra Zeneca, Einstein Health System, JFK, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, Four Seasons Resort Worldwide, Hilton Worldwide, IHG, NTT, Cooper Co, and Duke Energy. Their core belief is that every customer is a partner, and every use case is an opportunity to drive smarter and more agile digital and mobile-forward solutions.
We recently caught up with 22MILES and asked them questions about their company and their relationship with SEGD.
22MILES
Tell us a little about your company, and what sets it apart from the competition?
22MILES Digital signage & interactive wayfinding is built on the idea of providing customers with agile and adaptive technology to solve challenges and inspire organizational innovation through technology. We operate as not just a software provider, but also as a digital partner to any type of design firm, system integrator, and facilities of all sizes, curating custom solutions that are created to meet and exceed both imagination and expectation.
While many companies structure their organizations with resources scattered across many departments, 22MILES focus has always been on technology development and working directly with our clients and partners to produce unique and exciting outcomes.
How did the company come into being?
22MILES was formed by CEO Joey Zhao and partners in the heart of Silicon Valley. As a programmer and visionary, the concept of 22MILES came through pioneering interactive wayfinding technology, with Tomer Mann expanding the idea to digital signage and related software and solutions innovation. Over the last decade, 22MILES has established a position at the forefront of the industry, winning awards, and partnerships with major industry players such as FD2S, OpenEye Global, Selbert Perkins, Show&Tell, CRTLS, Corbin, and many others.
What is the company culture like at 22MILES?
22MILES is a diverse company made up of high achieving individuals of all races, genders, and age groups. The company has multiple offices across the U.S, serving clients around the world. An environment of creativity, trust, and open communication, often projects are conceived and executed through an agile workplace model where customer requests and needs are just as urgent as the teams’ vision of how the company can best serve its valued partners and clients.
What are a few projects that have been pivotal to your company, and why?
Okada Casino
This ambitious project required a solution that could support more than 633 different resolution and orientation screens in Okada’s large facilities, delivering on their “Stay, play, dine, relax” experiences quickly and seamlessly. 22MILES offered the casino resort a dynamic digital transformation that would allow them to manage better, control, and disseminate information, navigation, and media.
Since the initial installation, 22MILES has continued to move forward, bringing even more advancements and dynamic solutions to the legendary casino’s grounds. The partnership promises to solidify Okada as one of the premier casino attractions in the world.
This project helped further establish 22MILES as a global leader in digital signage deployments on a large scale, utilizing a robust CMS that managed all aspects of daily casino experiences from single screens to jumbo LED curved walls. The project positioned the company as a proven firm and has assisted in allowing 22MILES to attain more knowledge-focused projects and solution scopes going forward.
PHX International Airport chose 22Miles Digital Signage and design partner for their signage upgrade portion of the T4 terminal renovation. This installation featured seventeen 46″ bolted down interactive wayfinding digital signage kiosks from Forge Media design. The full solution also consisted of interactive point-to-point wayfinding kiosks with visual communication and real-time flight information.
22Miles Publisher Pro 5.0 Digital Signage Software powers all the systems deployed. The True-User design and editing capabilities of Publisher Pro provided the large airport an intuitive real-time map creation module that enables PHX staff to edit mapping routes and pathways to gates, shops, hotspots, and other listed locations.
The free-standing interactive digital signage wayfinding kiosks include a QR code reader allowing for passengers to scan their boarding passes to receive turn-by-turn directions to their gates. Built into the kiosk user interface (UI) is an intuitive question oriented menu that encourages travelers to discover all the airport offers. Users can browse through store and restaurant listings and even read a short description of each of the locations. The kiosks supported ADA requirements with built-in display adjustment capabilities, a magnifier feature, and wheelchair accessible routing. To improve efficiency, 22MILES added real-time automation of any gate changes with direct integration to the FIDS lives data interface. This eliminated the need for PHX staff having to update gate changes manually.
This was one of the first airport projects 22MILES was a part of. 22MILES thankfully teamed up with Forge Media, who pushed the CMS and the built-in features to new customizations and enhancements to meet their storyboard and wireframe requirements. The partnership allowed for a different perspective, a new methodology to project management and design. 22Miles has been able to leverage the great efforts of the Forge graphic design and project design experience on all future projects and show the agile capabilities of the 22MILES development team.
Orange County Convention Center
22MILES partnered with Orange County Convention Center to bring a better visitor experience to the hundreds of thousands of people who walk through the convention center doors every year. 22MILES deployed 117 digital signs throughout the massive footprint of the OCCC campus. The combination of touchscreens and non-touch screens were strategically placed to:
- Help reduce confusion when navigating the multi-building campus
- Keep guests up to date with the latest news
- Provide event feed automation with Ungerboeck integration
- Increase engagement with the amenities offered.
Additionally, the mobile wayfinding app UI/UX was developed utilizing 22MILES’ Publisher Pro software, which has a built-in iOS/Android mobile development kit. The digital signage system provides OCCC with the capabilities to dynamically change the interface, update any graphics assets, and with analytics, perform user experience updates anytime.
This was the first large scale convention center 22Miles was able to refresh from an older solution and provide a next-level application that simplified the venues’ digital media controls. With the added SDK plug-in, OCCC was able to then leverage 22MILES for a one of a kind custom iOS/Android app that they developed almost entirely in-house, leveraging the drag-and-drop features of the CMS. This was the first time a client designed their own mobile experience with the 22MILES platform from scratch.
What is something you wish designers knew about your company, products, or services?
It is commonplace for organizations and users who work in our Publisher Pro Solution to discover capabilities within it that they were unaware existed. The depth of research and development that goes into 22MILES solutions is often not realized until users have been working within the solution for a while.
By design, our platform is engineered to be expansive and adaptive to user needs, allowing organizations to grow without having to find other solutions that can “Catch up” to where they are. 22Miles, as a Silicon Valley cultural minded solution provider, has over 25 developers always pushing trends and enhancing the solution to stay above the cut. This R&D tech-first approach provides all the building blocks for project design success for years to come.
What is the best part of working with experiential graphic design professionals?
Design firms can add all their methodology without limiting their creative control, and the WYSIWYG platform of 22MILES can quickly assemble, trigger, setup, and deploy the final vision of any design firm. The collaboration makes the partnership always an exciting new ride and a fulfilling journey to customer satisfaction. 22MILES has focused on the art of creative design combined with project management, visual perspectives with UI vs. UX, and how to push the limits of the CMS. In the event something can’t be leveraged with the current settings, then 22MILES advances the widgets or property settings ASAP (or we don’t hear the end of it)!
What is the hardest part of what you do?
Because our business is based on agility and the ability to adapt to the market and the world quickly, the pace to which we respond to customer requests can sometimes be head-spinning. That being said, perhaps our greatest challenge is to communicate all of the capabilities of our solutions both on the market and in development, at a pace that informs customers and the market that we hear the voices of those who are seeking technology to solve problems, and we are responding with urgency and commitment.
What is the most rewarding thing for you/your employees?
The satisfaction of knowing that our diverse team, often working from remote locations, can work together under nearly any circumstances and produce outcomes that we as a company can be proud of for ourselves and our customers. The sheer amount of development that the R&D team deploys and releases daily keeps everyone that works at 22MILES always passionate and perplexed. There is never a stagnation or lack of inspiration to find solutions within our company.
What technology or software tools are you developing now?
- Expansions to our Protection as a Service solution, a suite of solutions designed to adapt to the new realities of a post-pandemic world. These expansions include Temp Sensor IP with AI-enabled calibrations for better pre-screening accuracy, In-house Virtual Video Call solutions for social distancing management, a secure mobile control to power any digital solution through a mobile HTML app that operates as mobile touchpad control, and more.
- PublisherPro.AioT – The latest version of our CMS, with more sensor-focused integrations, device management tools for enterprise deployments, voice control and command, image-recognition technology for the AR Mobile plug-in solution, and more.
- Technology innovations – Our team is hard at work on a new solution that will allow an unprecedented level of user control and access for any screens that need to be controlled, on their mobile device of choice—more details to come.
What do you see as the future of your field or for your business?
We see a future where floorplans, buildings, work-life, customer experiences, and the way that companies and the public interact are changing. Technology will play a major role in keeping people safe, connected, and informed in a world where many different challenges impact how we live, work, and consume the world around us. 22MILES is committed to providing that technology and introducing new and better ways for our world to connect and thrive.
SEGD
How did your relationship with SEGD begin?
Tomer Mann was introduced through a colleague, and after one XLAB conference, he was hooked for life. The audience was at a transcending level of environmental design and piqued interest in where the digital solution fits their world. That drove home the fact that digital signage will be a considerable part of SEGD. In the future, SEGD’s name and position to experiential design will continue to evolve towards “future-thinking, “ which is exactly the model 22MILES has pursued from its inception.
What role does participation in SEGD play in your company?
The partnerships that have been developed, the design approach “methodologies” that have been ingrained, and the vision for future trends have forever changed 22MILES and Tomer Mann. SEGD allowed a small start-up to push beyond its software-only comfort zone to an experiential and immersive design-friendly scale.
>>> More about 22MILES.
Congratulations to the 2020 SEGD Achievement Award winners!