Last exit
The Food will be great; Post-Apocalypse.
The next time you’re driving from Dubai to Abu Dhabi pull off at The Last Exit for a peek into a post-apocalyptic food truck world. Everything that can be served up from a food truck can be found here all set in a futuristic Mad Maxesque setting. If you like roof-mounted machine guns and demolition derby’s, this is the place for you.
Challenge
The biggest challenge was design based – the post-apocalyptic theme made it difficult to find fabrication methods and authentic aesthetics.
Outcome
Going through this process helped achieve the real found object look of an imagined future.
ROADSIDE ATTRACTION
Last Exit is now a popular weekend destination where one can pull up on the highway, choose from a variety of trucks and enjoy some food complete with picnic tables etc.
designed for the experience
LIMAH started by studying the existing Last Exits as a foundation, and one of the main problems discovered by the team was that visitor’s often entered the area through the wrong lane, making it very difficult to get to the right food truck and thus causing congestion.
The team came up with a solution – large-scale messages to assign a lane to each food truck, that can be viewed at an advanced stage of the visitors’ journey so as to avoid confusion and traffic and provide a good experience overall.
The hunt for authenticity
Internally, the team looked for reference everywhere – the Mad Max films provided a great source of inspiration for the vehicles (roof-mounted machine guns, demolition derbies), the wall art, other wayfinding element and signage itself.
LIMAH wanted to take these components through this research and combine them so that the final work not only paid homage to the films but turned into its own unique experience.
Working with craftsmen and sourcing found objects – for example, old shopping carts cranes, old parts that could be chopped up into signage. Essentially, if one were in the futuristic post-apocalyptic world, what one could use to make signage, given the limited resources.
Ideas without boundaries
As Experience Designers our role is to explore our clients’ vision and bring it down into a physical customer journey. Often the ideas generated early on are the wildest, extreme and the most fun. Although not always practical early ideas without boundaries set the tone of projects and often lead to new discoveries that improve the guest experience.
In the design world, not every concept gets executed. Over the course of the project our work became more child-friendly and not so dark, but letting loose creatively without boundaries is the best way to start a project. Be sure to check out the Last Exit. The end result is a “happy post-apocalypse” if you can call it that.
