a touch wall a room can vote on

A leading education programming company reached out to SYPartners with a remit to explore the future of AI in childhood education. SYPartners answered with a day long exploratory workshop that had to make the case for working with us. As part of the discussion, we curated real examples of new relationships between people and AI, and imagined showing them on the large touch wall in our Lab as a gallery that a group could explore together, vote on, and then use to determine where the energy for the afternoon's discussion was. We had two weeks, and the content would keep changing until the night before.

The wall needed to do more than inspire. The group would explore topics together, vote on what interested them, and we'd then use that pattern to choose where the afternoon went. So the interaction had to be simple enough for a first-time visitor to pick up in seconds, and the result had to be readable from across the room.

A tap flips a card from its image or video to the story behind it. Holding a finger on a card fills a ring and casts a vote, a deliberate gesture that the people standing nearby can see. Each card then glows according to its share of the votes, so the wall becomes its own heat map and there is no separate results screen to switch to.

The Lab's wall runs its own presentation software, which handles slides and simple hotspots well but not this kind of interaction. I built the gallery as a web app instead, on Next.js and Vercel with a Postgres database and image storage behind it, working with Claude Code. That decision made the rest of the process possible. Our designer and strategist kept refining copy and layout through an edit mode I built that wrote straight to the database, a facilitator could run the whole segment from a clicker, and we tested each new build on the wall itself throughout the week.

It also meant the gallery could run on any screen. When we learned one of the clients would join remotely, I added a phone and laptop version that votes into the same wall, so their choices showed up in the room alongside everyone else's.

The gallery was a clear success in that it set the stage as an exemplar of differentiated thinking, garnered awe from the client, and framed a rich discussion around the possibilities of AI and technology in the classroom. The wall stayed up in the Lab the next few days for the rest of the firm, sparking additional uses of the tech going forward. I have since turned it into a template that other teams can copy for their own sessions.