LOCATION-BASED ENTERTAINMENT
The Switcher
Gamifying the science of movement
Client
ASB GlassFloors
Role
Design Lead
Year
2026
Team
5 (1 designer, 4 business)
Format
Innovation Sprint — 2 weeks, Milan + Naples
Nobody skips the warm-up because they think it's optional. They skip it because it's boring, and boredom is a design problem.
THE PROBLEM
Skipping a proper warm-up raises injury risk by roughly 30%. Everyone in sport knows this. Almost nobody does it.
We asked why. None of the answers had anything to do with knowledge:
- It feels like a chore. The tax you pay before the thing you came to do.
- There's no time. It competes with the session itself.
- It's boring. Repetitive, solitary, unmeasured.
The gap isn't information. It's motivation — and motivation is designable.
THE DECISION
Most fitness gamification bolts a scoreboard onto an existing exercise. Points for reps, badges for streaks. The exercise stays the same and the game sits on top.
We took the opposite position: the game mechanic had to be the exercise.
Not squats rewarded with points — squats that are the ammunition. Not stomping as a metric, but stomping as the trigger. Remove the game and the movement stops making sense; remove the movement and the game stops working.
Stomp to shoot. Squat to recharge HP.
The whole product in six words — and a clinically valid activation sequence.
EVIDENCE OVER INVENTION
We could have invented fifteen levels of gameplay. Instead we built them on RAMP — Raise, Activate, Mobilize, Potentiate — an established warm-up protocol from sports science.
Every level maps to a phase. Fifteen levels, one progression, ending where a body is measurably ready to perform.
Inventing the sequence would have given us more freedom and a weaker claim.
Anchoring to RAMP meant the gameplay had to bend to the physiology rather than the reverse. It also means the product can defend what it says it does.
WHO IT'S FOR
Three users, three reasons to walk in:
- The Performance Seeker wants an edge. Buys the science.
- The Beginner wants confidence. Buys the guidance.
- The Entertainment Seeker wants fun. Buys the game and gets the warm-up as a side effect.
The third is the commercially important one, and the one the design is optimised for.
If it only works for people who already care about warm-ups, it isn't solving the problem we named.
THE BUSINESS CASE
€15 per 15-minute session. B2C, pay-per-session, priced against other location-based leisure.
300 users a day across 320 operating days: 96,000 sessions a year, €1.44M in recurring revenue, with €360K going to the venue partner.
[UTILISATION PARAGRAPH — see open items]
In Switzerland the top of the funnel is 6.7M active technology-entertainment users. 500K are reachable inside a one-year campaign. 25–50K are obtainable in year one.
GETTING THE FIRST USERS
The hardest part of a location-based product isn't the product. It's the first visit.
A five-second minigame in the foodcourt, where people are already standing still and already deciding how to spend the next hour.
That's the demo tile: zero friction, adjacent to the point of sale. Three more, ordered by how much they ask of someone:
- Partnership integrations. A "Ready-State Calibration" voucher on every court-booking confirmation — the warm-up sold at the moment someone commits to playing.
- Live scoreboard. Top scores displayed in the venue. The queue becomes the advertising.
- Social. One format: someone failing, then winning. Micro-influencers rather than paid reach.
ROADMAP
From one venue in Zurich to a category rather than a product.
- 01 Validation in Zurich
- 02 Event formats and streaming
- 03 Additional facilities across Europe
- 04 A recognised hub for active entertainment
MY ROLE
Five people: four economists and management engineers, and me.
What I owned:
- The core mechanic, and the decision to couple game to exercise rather than layer them
- The RAMP mapping and the fifteen-level progression
- Brand identity, logotype and the full visual system
- All spatial and interface renders
- The acquisition mechanics, particularly the foodcourt demo tile
What I didn't own, and should have: the direction.
WHAT I'D DO DIFFERENTLY
Teams presented to ASB's CEO at the end of the sprint. Ours didn't place.
I think I know why, and it isn't the comfortable version.
We led with the thing the client already had.
ASB builds LED sports flooring and already produces interactive floor games. The game layer — the part our deck opens with — was the least differentiated thing we brought. What they didn't have was a defensible physiological claim. The RAMP grounding was our actual edge, and we ran it as a supporting slide.
That's my own first principle, missed on my own project. The brief said entertainment. We designed entertainment. We never asked what ASB was actually short of.
In week one I had a different answer, and an artifact to go with it.
Week one. The direction I didn't defend.
Pose tracking on the floor. The environment responding to a yoga practice. The venue as a calm, exclusive space rather than an arcade. I made the image in the first week — and then I stopped defending it. I slid into facilitating the group's vision instead of holding my own.
Facilitating felt useful. It was also the more comfortable place to stand.
A team that combined meditation and yoga won the sprint.
Being the only designer among four business profiles means the design argument doesn't get made unless you make it. I made myself the facilitator instead.
Three things I'd fix regardless of the outcome:
- The revenue model needs a utilisation rate. 300 users a day across 320 days assumes near-continuous occupancy. A base case at 40–60% would have been more defensible.
- The price benchmark can't support its claim. €15 for 15 minutes is roughly €60 an hour — two to three times the rate of the 60–90 minute activities we compared to.
- Nothing was tested with a body. No prototype, no playtest, no measured outcome.
Next Project
BlablaTribe →