Open Shop, Internet Week

Hello

Long time no speak…

I had the pleasure of visiting some digital design agencies that I wasn’t aware of before. I would like to thank Poke, Digit & Somethin’ Else for an afternoon of wonderful ideas and lovely projects. The agencies were very welcoming I even got a cup of tea at Poke.

First I went to Poke, at the Biscuit Building, they do a lot work online. They focused on their newest project, which is Balloonacy, for Orange. It is a race on across the internet, sounds crazy but it is brilliant. When people explain that is a race across the internet, people sort of look at you blankly and then screw their face up and say “What?”, I cant imagine what is was like for the designers explaining to people. But the execution is simple which make this project so lovely.

Secondly we went to Digit near Brick Lane. These guys do more stuff that I understood with processing (coding). They had some nice projects too, one that stood out was Bob the Lamp. Bob’s mood would be dictated by the RSS feed of the BBC website, the good news there was Bob would be upright and bright but when it was bad news Bob would be down and blue. I liked this as it made me smile and I think that is a big part of interaction design. It was simple and gave an object a personality, which I think is brilliant.

Lastly went to Somethin’ else design, I felt sorry for the person (Paul Bennun) showing us round because it was 6 o’clock and I bet he wanted to go home. He was a really nice bloke, he showed us round the building. They had an array of recording studios for live interactions, which seems pretty cool and they had a huge amount of editing suites. Paul also managed to show a few projects they were working on which involved a website called “Super Me” another cool idea to help teenagers be better at life by watching videos, playing games and other activities. Each time you play a game or watch a video your attributes goes up and you can share this on facebook. This a really lovely idea to get teenagers to realise they are not bad people but they are learning and might need a bit of help along the way.

All these agencies have much more going on than I have explained, I urge all of you to check them out.