April 25th, 2010
Recode | Decode our work for the V&A has been nominated for a pencil at D&AD
Saint’s work for the V&A Museum has been nominated for a D&AD pencil
This is a fantastic achievement, whether we win it or not. Simply being nominated is a recognition of the quality of the work, and it’s thoroughly deserved. The team who worked on it all cared passionately about the project and went that extra mile at every stage to make it the best it could be. I’m tremendously proud of them all.
This accomplishment is made even more great by the fact that we had a tiny budget and managed to achieve a great deal with the pennies we had to spend. The work itself is well polished with great production values. We managed to use some new technologies such as Augmented Reality invites, which displayed an interactive 3d shape when held up to a webcam, and the results are absolutely outstanding. It was one of the most successful launches the V&A have ever done, surpassing visitor targets by 100%. The campaign reached 1.6 million people online and was featured on 1,122 social media channels.
You can view a video which summarises the campaign and its results here
Essentially, we were asked to promote the up coming Decode exhibition. It was a the largest installation of digital art in Britain and the theme was ‘open source’. These two concepts are an absolute dream to be working with as they provided a fertile ground for our creative concepts to explore.
The V&A had commissioned Karsten Schmidt to design a digital identity for the Decode exhibition. We asked if we could allow the users to get under the hood of this work and recode it themselves. To our surprise, the V&A and Karsten were fine with this. Happy days, this was all of a sudden a potentially very cool project indeed. So, we created a website with an interface that allowed users to control variables and affect the artwork in real time. We also made the code itself available and provided links to all the tools they would need get right down to the details and tinker away as much as they wanted. People could then submit their work to be displayed in the gallery. The best examples were then built into the digital outdoor display, such as the cross track projectors and LCD screens. The very best work was then put into the exhibition itself. This was a great example of UGC or Co-Creation actually providing something that was valuable and not just a gimmick. It was fundamentally in line with the theme of the exhibition and helped increase amplification because the sort of people who would enjoy the installation were also the sort of people who would enjoy tinkering with the code and embraced the open source philosophy.
All in all a really super piece of work and very much in line with the beliefs and values that we at Saint embrace.
