Uniform

Sweet Tweet

By Pete Thomas

We do all this under the umbrella of our research platform, ULAB. We play with technology, process and methods, and prototype stuff to challenge the way we think, ask new questions and start new conversations. It’s naturally become a default way of thinking and doing that we apply to everything we do.

In contrast to client work, our ULAB projects are incremental and organic in the way we approach them, which is a nice way of saying that quite often we don’t know how we’re going to make them happen, or what they’ll turn into and sometimes we need to make it up as we go along. We don’t always get things right and sometimes things take longer than expected or veer off in different directions but the projects share a commitment to playfulness, experimentation and humour.

Sweet Tweet is the first project to come out of ULAB.
A few years ago I began working with Dr Jon Rogers at the University of Dundee to explore the idea of Physical Apps. We defined a Physical App as an object that connects to the internet to perform dedicated tasks that enable users to access information or services without using a standard interface like a mouse, keyboard or touchscreen. In particular we felt that the touch screen was becoming an interaction hegemony narrowing the quality and effectiveness of online interactions at a time when new technology offers us a multitude of divergent platforms. By looking sideways and exploring different platforms we can create richer, more meaningful and ultimately more profitable (in the broadest sense of the word) interactions.

Sweet Tweet is an extension of this idea. We wanted to create a physical app that connected our studio to our Twitter followers, raising awareness and alerting us all to each new follower. We’d also just made our Philosophy film and there seemed to be a great opportunity to bring it to life. So we created a cuckoo clock that dispenses sweets for our team to eat, each time we get a new follower on Twitter. This creates a collective connection to our followers in the studio – when we get a new follower the Sweet Tweet clock hand moves and a pair of doors is pushed open by a whistling toy train dispensing a gum-ball! The red dial of the clock is calibrated, moving one place with every new follower – until it does a full 360° turn. Now every time we’re followed on Twitter, everyone in the studio shares a very tangible, glanceable and aural notification as our clock toots and tweets a sweet, which makes us all smile.

Once we’d connected the studio to our Twitter followers, we wanted to make a more tangible connection back to our followers, repaying their efforts for following us, so we decided to make a paper rollercoaster for our gumballs to travel along, and film the progress of the gumball as it drops, as a thank you to each follower. Now each time someone follows us on Twitter we send them a Thank You tweet that links them to the film.
The result owes no small debt to Brendan Dawes’ 2007 Doorbell, and Durrell Bishop’s 1992 Marble Answer Machine and Adrian McEwan’s Bubblino– if you haven’t seen either of these it’s worth having a look for them.

It would not have been possible without Martin’s tireless Arduino skills, processing code courtesy of Vlad Cazan, the help of Jon Rogers and Ali Napier at the University of Dundee, the folk at #makernight, and the relentless paper engineering from our D&AD Graduate Academy intern Shaun Baldwin!

Read more on FastCoDesign, AdWeek, Wired and PSFK.

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