The Design Museum is running an exhibition called Super Contemporary, it’s about the history of design in London. They kindly asked us geeks at Poke to make a map charting the history of the digital design scene from 1994 to today. So we made this map thingy in flash that you control with a proper real world knob that sits patiently under the big old plasma screen in the exhibit. The knob magic is achieved with some help from an Arduino.

Gathering all the data was not exactly simple, we needed to know staff numbers for most of the digital agencies in London (sorry, we couldn’t include them all) for each quarter of each year for 13 years, and a lot of them don’t exist anymore. A lot of favours were pulled, and many painful wounds re-opened. We thought about being respectful about when each company died during the bubble burst… but then thought ‘sod it’ and made them TOTALLY ASPLODE!!!1 instead.

Of course when I say ‘we’ did it, what I really mean is me n Jas designed it and animated some bits, the hard stuff was done by TV’s Chris Boardman. The data gatherer was The Hoss and Mr Zolty was the knob guy.

Here’s some photos of it being installed, and some mild panic of getting the damn thing working.

Our touch screen guide to the inner working of The Great Clock (that’s Big Ben kids) has been installed into it’s custom built wooden paneled unit half-way up The Clock Tower. Wonderfully styled to fit in with all the pomp and tradition of parliament. Try out the animation below, or ask your MP for a tour. WARNING, it’s 394 steps to the top.

The Science Museum commissioned us to create a series of interactive animations to guide visitors though the very complex inner working of all their steam engine. These were installed as kiosks throughout the new Engine Hall at the museum.

View Animations

This project for the London Science Museum took about 9 months to complete. It’s a series of interactive scenes that detail some of the most important advances in science in engineering. Here are a few example scenes: