One of the driving questions behind everything we do is ‘How do we have better experiences?’ Our work at Unbox built on Sam’s blog post transformations for experience where he discusses three ways of augmenting peoples capacity to experience: sensory augmentation, memory augmentation and attitudinal adjustment.
We built a time machine. That is to say, we built an installation structure, that could serve as a dramatic entry-point for an immersive theatre event set in the past. Wilfred Bagshaw’s Time Emporium was jointly organised by Winterwell and The Tom Sawyer Effect with other partners, such as ourselves. In it’s inaugural instance the audience/ players [...]
Over the past four months, we have been working with the charity Mind on a co-designed mental health peer support forum named ‘Elefriends‘. Mind had developed a strong online community, including a number of trained peer supporters on a popular but restrictive Facebook page. Users found great value in logging in, confiding in the community, [...]
We were commissioned to design and build a sensory-focused ‘flash market’ space for Be Open, to be hosted by Tom Dixon at The Dock. We worked with JAILmake to produce ten cabins, each one providing space for upcoming designer-makers to show their wares. Design and Build Timing was critical. We received the brief only seven days [...]
As part of Joue le Jeu at La Gaite Lyrique, a newly restored Parisian Museum with a digital focus, Hide and Seek tasked us with designing the building’s heart. This was the place where selected successful players of The Building Is… games would be summoned to change the emotion of the building. The space was [...]
Sound Off For Justice was a campaign commissioned by the Law Society to warn about cuts to Legal Aid. We were brought in to look at ways to get people involved, as well as designing the visual of the campaign.
We worked with Jump Studios and Unity to build a space for Marks & Spencer and Oxfam, in support of their Shwopping concept. The campaign focused on the benefits of re-using and re-distributing clothing that is often thrown away. Our brief was to design a lecture and workshop space, which would allow fashion designers to [...]
On March 20th, Capcom’s Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City was launched to the general public. To promote the game a large trans-media campaign was organised by Idea Generation. An alternative reality game was built for mobile platforms by Digicave. The Tom Sawyer Effect worked with ourselves and Reuben Feels to provide an immersive live game to work [...]
This Way Up was an exhibition/ auction/ workshop/ arts book store/ hardware shop we built in Hoxton for the British Council, during London Design Week to celebrate the fifteenth year of their Architecture, Design and Fashion department (and the 89 exhibitions they had created so far). Exhibition & Silent Auction Some of the work on show [...]
Over December we launched This Is Why You’re Festive, a combined advent calendar and high-street sandwich review blog. The project lead on from some exploration we’d been doing into experience and food. The premise was as follows: “…For the grown adult sans offspring, the wonder and nostalgia of a childhood Christmas really only lives on through the tastes, [...]
We worked with DWFE on their experiential Green = Boom project which looked at the modern relationship to bombs and violence that is presented through both factual and fictional media. By giving people the first hand experience of diffusing a bomb, albeit a cinematically informed one, Green = Boom questioned how we would feel face to face with a ticking bomb…
For Halloween 2011, we used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to simulate telekinetic powers in volunteers. Under the premise of attempting a “séance”, at a suitably haunted venue above Kensal Green cemetery, we asked players of an immersive game, facilitated by The Tom Sawyer Effect, to don an electrical-impulse reading headset and concentrate on a lamp. By [...]
Winterwell is a camping festival in the Cotswolds and has steadily grown in size for the last 4 years. As well as the usual features that might be expected of a summer festival – music, mud, alcohol etc. – there’s also a strong tradition of thematic “subversive theatre” and gaming. The theme for 2011 was “boardgames”…
In collaboration with Designers Front we produced Blind Data, an installation for London Design Festival 2010. We took an innocuous set of window blinds and edited them to display information about the festival. Specifically we visualised the amount of chatter on Twitter surrounding the four main events occurring through-out that week: ADF, Designers’ Block, 100% [...]
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, by Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is a multi-genre novel set in Edo era Japan, on the man-made island of Dejima. This synopsis is as follows:
“Set in atmospheric coastal Japan, this epic story centers on an earnest young clerk, Jacob de Zoet…
To promote the release of Stephen King’s novel Under The Dome, the final 2 sentences were exploded into paired words and hidden in a gigapixel photo (a large, composite image) of London City, beneath St. Paul’s dome…
A version of this poster was displayed at Neville Brody’s Anti Design Festival in 2010. It illustrates the relationship between taking risks and gaining experiences.