This session explores value engineering not as a last resort, but as a creative discipline in its own right. I’ll walk through how I distilled a £285K multi-room immersive installation, initially designed for a double-decker bus, into an £850 in-school pop-up, built solo without a production team.

But this isn’t just a budget story. It’s a design practice that forced every puzzle, prop, and narrative beat to earn its place through intentional subtraction, not addition.

We’ll explore how constraint becomes a prototyping superpower: a fast, flexible method for exposing the structural logic of your experience, validating your design with real users, and pressure-testing the emotional (and educational) impact before scaling back up.

Whether you’re building with £1K or £1M, this session offers a hands-on reflection on how stripping back can reveal what truly matters, and how this process can strengthen your final work and why experience creators should embrace this practice.