From £285K To £850: Why Value-Engineering Is A Creative Superpower

Session

From £285K to £850: Why Value-Engineering Is a Creative Superpower

Tues

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.

Skye Von

Spark&Bond

I’m a Creative Director and Experience Designer with over 15 years’ experience shaping immersive environments, brand storytelling, and educational experiences for global brands, cultural institutions, and social impact organisations. I’ve led narrative-driven work for clients including Paramount, Bulgari, Meta, and the UNHCR, spanning installations, activations, and learning platforms.

Most recently, I founded Spark&Bond to explore how story-led, hands-on, playful subject immersion can unlock real-world learning for children and families. My practice is rooted in emotional logic, tactical design, and audience participation, with a deep belief in the benefits of value-engineering and prototyping as critical tools in experience design. I bring a cross-sector, human-centred perspective to experience creation, with a belief that real-world constraint can sharpen creative clarity.

https://www.skyevon.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/skyevon/

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