Booth Build for GSNC 2015

March 4th-7th, the Green Schools National Conference was held in Virginia Beach in the Virginia Beach Convention Center. The Green Schools National Conference celebrates sustainability throughout K-12 schools and school districts. The conference brings together students, design professionals and school faculty to discuss and learn new ways to incorporate green initiatives into schools. This year, conference attendees toured HBA’s Kellam High School before their two-day conference, to see the sustainable features and flexible classrooms included in the school.

In the spirit of sustainability, HBA decided to go above and beyond the typical conference booth for this event. We pushed our limits creatively, and designed a booth made completely out of recycled materials. Now we just had to find and assemble them!

For the first challenge, came our booth walls. They were created out of large re-used pallets that we saved from a dumpster outside our office. From there, we removed some of the boards and re-aligned them, re-using the same nails so that our booth would have a cleaner look. We then created a stencil of our logo and painted it across one of the pallet walls.

Next, we assembled the pallet walls, which were about 10′ tall and 10′ long on each side. Since the theme for our booth was the “HBA Maker Space” we wanted to create a table for visitors to work on to create things made out of recycled materials. We built our table using old cardboard shipping boxes and paper rolls. We screwed about 40 paper tubes together (we do a lot of printing here at HBA) to create the base of our table. Then, we cut circles out of the cardboard shipping boxes and glued them together tightly to create our table top. After putting in a few screws to hold the table top to the base, we were ready to create! An old wooden door screwed to one of the pallet walls created a storage area for our raw materials.

To add the finishing touches to our booth, we created an “HBA Maker Space” sign, which was routed out of an old piece of metal. To create a place for sketching out ideas, we used a piece of homasote covered in burlap, and pinned dry erase posterboard to it. Then, we installed LED track lighting to give our space an extra “pop”. Last but not least, we wanted to give our booth space a more inviting feel, so we decided to use carpet tile flooring made out of recycled bottles to delineate our space.

This process was a really fun way for all of us here at HBA to spend a little extra bonding time together, while exercising our creative muscle and coming up with a display that really stood out at the conference. We so enjoyed creating the “HBA Maker Space”, and had a great time meeting all of you who were able to see it in person at the Green Schools National Conference.

Look out for another blog post coming soon sharing our experiences at the conference!