Kiro scavenger hunt
From paper to QR code, a conference experience designed, built, and shipped in fourteen days.
Role
Creative Lead
+ End-to-End Producer
company
Starshot
year
2026
the challenge
AWS wanted a scavenger hunt experience for GTC San Jose — something that would get conference attendees moving, engaged, and interacting with Kiro in a way that felt native to the event rather than bolted on.
The original plan involved physical pieces of paper.
There's nothing wrong with paper. But at a global AI and tech conference, a printed sheet felt like a missed opportunity. If the experience was going to reflect the product and the moment, it needed to be digital, interactive, and built to live in the room.
The timeline to make that happen: two weeks.
The Real Problem
The constraint wasn't just speed. It was the number of handoffs a concept normally travels through before it ships — and how much gets lost at each one.
Client vision to creative brief. Brief to prototype. Prototype to dev. Dev to QR code in someone's hand at a conference. Every translation is a place where something drops. The only way to protect the idea end to end was to stay in it end to end.
What We Built
DAy 1: Concep to brief
Using Claude to accelerate the structural thinking — game logic, user flow, UX copy — I turned AWS's vision into a written brief and clickable prototype in a single afternoon. Not a rough sketch. Something a developer could actually build from.
week 1: prototype to build
I stayed in the project as one dev got to work — creative direction, copy decisions, UX calls, feedback on each iteration. The kind of presence that keeps a build from drifting from the original intent.
week 2: build to shipped
Final refinements, QR code integration, event-ready delivery, we were a two person team. Attendees at GTC San Jose scanned a code and walked into a live digital scavenger hunt built from scratch in fourteen days.
the workflow
This is where AI earned its place — not by generating the idea, but by collapsing the distance between idea and artifact.
Claude handled the structural work: game mechanics, logic mapping, UX language. That freed me to stay focused on the creative judgment calls throughout — what the experience needed to feel like at each step, where the friction was, what a real GTC attendee would actually do in the room.
The speed wasn't about cutting corners. It was about removing the lag that normally lives between thinking and making.
the tension
Two weeks is not a comfortable timeline for shipping a live digital experience. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But the AI-assisted workflow didn't just make it possible — it made it better. Because when you can move from concept to testable prototype in an afternoon, you get more iterations, more feedback loops, more chances to get it right before it's real. Speed, used well, is a quality tool.
The paper version would have been fine. This shipped on a QR code at one of the biggest tech conferences in the world. That's the difference.