Robotics Club Official Characters
Proposing and creating characters to be the face of the club
Overview
乃木須創愛 and 衣笠明星 (the club’s two original characters) are the official characters of the robotics club. I proposed the idea, and the whole club created them through discussion among the members. They were an attempt to give the club’s exhibitions, which tend to be technology through and through, an entry point that visitors from outside the field could warm to, and we put them to real use at the School Festival 2022 exhibition.
How it started
While I was driving the school festival exhibition plans as president of the robotics club, one comment kept appearing in visitor surveys from previous years: the exhibits were too technical, and people gave up partway through.
The exhibition is the club’s one opportunity a year to show its work to the outside world. If visitors walk away midway, it does not matter how good the robots are; none of it comes across. Above all, failing to reach new students who were undecided about joining fed directly into the next year’s recruiting, and ultimately into whether the club would survive. To stop visitors with no interest in robots, and students on the fence about joining, we needed a friendly entry point that came before any technical explanation. That reasoning led me to propose characters to serve as the face of the club.
Designing and deploying the characters
We designed the characters through exhaustive discussion among the members, looking for the design that would appeal most to the club’s two key audiences: the alumni who are its main supporters, and new students deciding whether to join. We drew on character-based publicity campaigns, the revitalization of the town of Oarai being a well-known example, and on how companies run their own character franchises. We also studied how an exhibition itself can use characters, sending members out to museums and event exhibits and visiting them myself.
First draft of 衣笠明星's standing illustration, adjusted to reflect members' requests (annotated) 
Rough standing illustration of 乃木須創愛 (annotated)
Character sheet for 衣笠明星: a commission spec setting out the profile and appearance 
Character sheet for 乃木須創愛: a commission spec setting out the profile and appearance
The life-size panel of 乃木須創愛, placed at the exhibition room reception as a guideAt the robotics club’s exhibition at School Festival 2022, we made the characters the guides, pairing them with an audio guide and designing a route where visitors tour the whole exhibition led by the characters. A life-size panel stood at the entrance, and the characters appeared prominently in the festival’s commercials and stairway ads, so they worked as hard for us as possible. We also produced original goods on the club’s own machine tools and handed them out, which drew considerable attention.
Chibi-style keychains made with a UV printer 
Clear file folders featuring the two charactersResults
With the characters as part of the wider exhibition overhaul, visitor numbers at the robotics club’s School Festival 2022 exhibit reached nine times the pre-COVID-19 level, and the exhibition won the Best Exhibition Award.
A group photo of the whole club, with the official characters' life-size panels at either endThe project has also helped bind the club together. Even now that I have graduated, character goods that younger members made on their own initiative sometimes find their way to me. The characters have outlasted the change of generations and are still loved in the club today.
Acrylic stands from the goods lineup 
An acrylic keychain made by a younger memberCharacter goods made by younger members (from the robotics club's official X account)
The project also taught me what character-driven publicity can do. A character stops people who have no interest in the technology itself, extends into goods and advertising, and gathers affection as time passes. One character transforms the experience of the exhibit, and the atmosphere of the whole club along with it. That insight, together with the habit of working backwards from how outsiders will receive something, is one I have kept using in later exhibitions, in pitches, and in product development.