Thursday, 20 August 2009

Black Box

Black Box Technology

This arrived in the post this morning. It's one of those black boxes I've been hearing a lot about. This will be very convenient for any critically-led projects where I lack the technological rudiments. Yay!

Thursday, 13 August 2009

Tea Is For Trouble

Today we launched http://www.teamergency.com/, as part of a social-media campaign we've been working on with PR company Unity for Direct Line.

The site explores the British relationship with tea, specifically in a crisis. It includes a research paper conducted with City University and a dynamic map of tea-related tweets tying into a competition to win a bespoke tea blended especially by master tea-blender, Alex Probyn.

Like Skindividual, this has been another brilliant job to work on - bringing so many design disciplines together (brand, print, digital, product, illustration, interaction etc.) into a holistic outcome has made this kind of project you hope to get over and over. An excellent team effort all round, but must give a special mention to our developer Jono Brain for getting knee-deep into the Google Map and Twitter APIs to pull this out of the bag, and for being a thoroughly helpful guy.

The Tea:

Teamergency Box

The Tea_robot:

Tea_Robot

Thursday, 6 August 2009

Interactive Kebab Furniture

This is great. At Lion's Fried Chicken, Brockley (an otherwise innocuous kebab house) is a table. With complete honesty and sincerity, it is one of my favourite tables of the year.

The interesting thing is, I'm quite certian it's a freakish and accidental one-off - an inadvertant piece of design interaction. There are about 4 or 5 cheap metal tables with grey-pink, laminated tops. But something has gone wrong with one of them. Somehow, the seal on the laminate has been breached or permeated and underneath are trapped 3 discrete 'substances'.

The first are air bubbles, which looks like white, amoebic blobs. The second is yellow and oil based. I wouldn't like to guess what this is, but we are, afterall, in a kebab shop. The third is the water-based pink colouring that gave the table it's original, unexeptional appearance - except now the oil has forced the ink down into the edges. This concentrated liquid is now a garish hot-pink colour. The overall result is a responsive panel of colour and form that can be manipulated with a firmly-applied thumb or fist, but will then ultimately leech back into its original state.

It's great fun after a few jars and a quarter-pounder.

Interactive Kebab Table