TouchTomorrow:
An Annual Celebration of All Things STEM

Client: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Project: Art Direction, Brand Management, UXUI Design
Event Date: 2012-2019 Annual Event
Collateral: Branding, Iconography, Direct Mail, Email Marketing, Posters, Banners, Wayfinding, Signage, Billboards, Apparel, Social Media, Photography
Web Platform: Wordpress

Launched in 2012 and held every June, Worcester Polytechnic Institute opens its campus to the public for TouchTomorrow, a festival celebrating science, technology, robots, and all things STEM education for the K-12 audience and their families. The festival continues to grow every year, and currently boasts attendance of about 10,000 visitors during the 6 hour annual event.

TouchTomorrow was originally launched in celebration of WPI’s designation as host of NASA’s Sample Return Robot Challenge, the very first time a college campus was selected to host a NASA Centennial Challenge. The Sample Return Robot Challenge competition offered "a total $1.5 million to teams that demonstrated autonomous capability to locate, retrieve and return specific sample types to a designated zone".

Like all Centennial Challenges, the competition promoted technological innovations that could aid in NASA’s mission and work—in this case the development of a new generation of autonomous planetary rovers to explore diverse landscapes.

Although NASA chose to discontinue the Sample Return Robot Challenge after 2016, TouchTomorrow continues to grow and evolve as a festival and brand, encompassing more programming involving biology, biomedical engineering, chemistry, and video game development. In recent years, as our earliest guests from 2012 have started to enter their college search phase, WPI's Undergraduate Admissions division has begun to see "TouchTomorrow" listed on prospective student applications as their first introduction to WPI.

Awards:
2015 Education Digital Marketing Awards - Silver
2015 Publicity Club of New England Bell Ringer Awards - Bronze Bell

Branding: PopKitchen
Iconography: PopKitchen, AnnMarie Nichols Burtt, Sami Lipkin
Physical Collateral: Sami Lipkin, Melissa Arndt, Britt Hafford, Lynn Saunders
Responsive Website and Digital Collateral: AnnMarie Nichols Burtt
Photography: Matthew Burgos, Tony Rinaldo, Ben Bocko