The Wii Shit is a series of simple Arduino interaction experiments. This is the first, a gestural interface that favors the camp.

Just a bit of fun really, but as gestural interfaces become increasingly mainstream will they become intelligent enough to make this possible – to respond to subtleties in mood or mannerisms?

Someone with flamboyant or camp hand gestures searching itunes would receive a playlist suggestion including most of the Village People’s back catalogue. Alternatively a person in a bad mood with aggressive hand gestures would find themselves listening to a playlist of chill-out tracks.

Here are some of the many projects I stuck my nose in at some stage or another during my time there…

Adidas Group
Carlsberg
DLA Piper
E.ON
Europeana
Friends Provident
International Power
Lego
Reed Elsevier
Tigo Together
The Courtauld

In this case its using a feed from BBC news. It scans the feed for words associated with good, bad and sad news, calculates a value and changes 4 pin LED a different colour, red is bad, blue sad and green is good. Its a kind of data visualisation using light.

It’s my first little arduino / processing making adventure – pretty basic I know but watch this space…

2010 the year of the comeback, well at least for Heaven 17 anyway, they’re performing their Penthouse and Pavements album for the first time at various shows around Europe. The show is to be part gig, part multimedia exhibition with some pretty amazing creative folks doing a song each including – Malcolm Garret, Ian Anderson, Chris Bird (UVA), Ben Tomlinson (POKE), Jason Bruges and… err…me?

I chose ‘Song with No Name’, a pretty eerie number about some guy living with regrets of years gone by. Focusing on the ‘Can’t sleep’ lyric, I used UV paint activated by a strobe and synced-it to the beat. The result was a bit of Nightmare ; )

More info on the tour and other people involved  here

So we came up with the Issue Tracker – a real time search application that aggregates ongoing conversations around E.ON’s material issues. It searches the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, ranking the most talked about issues and displaying the most recent. Let’s say you we’re interested in an article on Renewable energy published on the Guardian, you can use the Issue Tracker to see what other people thought about it even if there comments were posted on Twitter or Facebook. Alternatively you could use it find for the most talked about blog posts right now on ‘clean coal’, view them at the source and use the issue tracker banner to navigate back to the application. It also allows E.ON to respond to what’s being talked about and gives a break-down of where the conversations are happening. It’s a good way for E.ON to show  they’re listening while they are busy formulating their social media strategy.

At a time when the demand for energy is on the increase, the threat of climate change has never been greater. Renewable sources of energy aren’t reliable and they’re expensive, especially
for 1000’s of families who can’t afford their energy bills to get any bigger.
What would you choose? Affordability? Reliability? Or low carbon energy? Something’s got to give – E.ON call it the ‘Energy Trilemma’.

We did a big old pitch back in late 2008 with the core idea focused on how to engage stakeholders and customers in the energy debate. Now we’re well into 2010 and E.ON have become on of salterbaxter’s largest clients. We’re continuing to work with them to advise them on sustainability strategy and creative digital work in all shapes and sizes as they continue to tackle the energy ‘Trilemma’. The left shows some of the work we delivered for them in 2009 along with the Talking Energy site lead by GU, DLKW and MediaComm.

Europeana is an amazing project, it’s aim is to digitise Europe’s entire cultural heritage. Institutions including British Library the Louvre and Rijksmuseum have contributed everything from books, paintings, videos, manuscripts and more to the portal – Amazing content all in one place and accessible to everyone. We were tasked with creating the brand and vision for the portal, along with the interface design and style-guide.

Brand idea

Think Culture was the brand idea, a rallying cry to anyone who’ll listen that Europeana is the place for new thoughts, ideas and inspiration. The brand consisted of a number of elements that could be applied to the portals content to create a visually eclectic brand that celebrates the diversity of Europe’s cultural heritage.

The Problem

SmithsNews are the UK’s leading Newspaper and Magazine distribution company with one of the fastest and largest supply chains in the world. However with Newspaper and magazine sales declining and their online communications looking tired, they were in danger of being left behind by the digital revolution.

The Solution

Our focus was to help SmithsNews understand how they could derive meaning from real time supply chain data and change perceptions of SmithsNews from a distribution company to a technology lead information specialist.

We made real-time supply chain feeds public. The website was transformed into a destination for market insight for the whole of newspaper and magazine industry. The scale of their supply chain meant consumer and regional trends could be identified.

SmithsNews would be seen as the authority on this insight, able to create content and offer advice to customers and suppliers based on its findings.

The interface reflected the nature of the business, professional and understated on the outside, buzzing, informed and data driven behind the scenes. The market insight dashboard is revealed from behind the clean interface at a click of button.

The problem
With the building industry responsible for a staggering 40% of carbon emissions, any company wanting to reduce their carbon footprint needs the full support of their workforce. Land Securities wanted to lead by example and be the first company in their industry to make it compulsory for their employees to track their own carbon emissions.

The project first came about when the concept of a carbon footprint was still relatively new to most people. What does a carbon footprint look like, how big is it and why should we bother? Any communications had to educate and inspire people to take action.

The Solution
The idea was simple  – make carbon emissions tangible, put things into perspective. So, we turned to the humble pencil -  used by everyone from architects to builders.

The carbon contained in the pencil’s lead seems like nothing to worry about, that’s until its scrawled out in front of you, one pencil can cover an area a meter squared with grey mess. With the average person releasing enough pencil carbon to cover  an area the size of Manchester in a day the problem soon hits home.

The website and carbon tracker was to be a Google maps mashup. Taking employees to various coordinates on the map to show how much area their emissions would have covered and the areas of natural beauty they have helped to protect that week.

Reminders to visit the site would have been found in the hands of employees across the company.