Katrin Baumgarten

0:41 Hi everyone first of all thanks for inviting us hersheyman to be here we are very happy to be part of this my name is kathleen baumgarten and as you heard I'm a senior interaction designer and I work for hersheyman and turtleman is builds interactive objects and environments and as you can see we love stuff which has to do with lights or electromechanical objects yeah. So but I'm here. Actually to talk to you about our project the red stripe project. And I'm gonna show you the final product first testing one two so yeah but how did we get here we basically were approached by kk outlet who is a communications agency and it was a truly collaborative project between them and sting digital and their very talented director greg brunkela and who so sting digital was doing the production and yeah what was our brief our brief was basically turning an ordinary looking east london corner shop into a musical instrument that plays itself whenever anyone picks up a red stripe so well when this brief came into the studio we got super excited like this is a project which you think you're kind of going to do all your life when you're at uni but actually in professional life.

3:48 That's not so often the case so yeah but what the brief actually doesn't say it's really quite ambitious. There was a limited budget and a super short time frame of only six weeks but yeah how did we start we basically tried to find the best supermarket which we found it's up in dallas and opposite to the rio cinema and the next thing we did was basically thought about loads of different crazy contraptions and made drawings which would fit in the shop and started a discussion with the director and it kind of developed into prototypes so it. Actually pushed our boundaries in terms of hacking everyday things into so making them into musical instruments which also had to sound good and I'm citing here line of the brief cans will seem to hop in their red great and bottles we cling together magically so we plus that plus a short time frame we also had to do some magic which is not necessarily very easy but magic in this time. Basically just means try to hide as much of the technology as possible in the end we kind of try to stay true to the ingredients of the corner store and try to make them come to life most naturally so like linking bottles or rolling noodle pots throughout the stages of refining and like kind of trying to focus down the brief and getting sign offs from all the different parties we were in the end only left with one week of actually building of the instruments for for the final installation so and this all this like kind of six weeks of like idea development and then the final week of building boiled down to the night before the install.

5:54 So this is um we are like and we rented a little space to to work in and as a time zone was assured there was no chance to actually have a run through before with all the instruments and we already like this is the second night we worked through everyone was super tired and a hiccup appeared so suddenly like the software to control everything was choking so we yeah like a little bit of a panic but luckily we had we have quite a we have experience with these situations obviously but also we have quite a good network of people who we can call at I don't know 11 o'clock at night and ask like so well if I have a little software problem what do I do and yeah we we solved the problem which it was actually quite a is yeah quite a small mistake in the end and one hour before before we we we before we had to go we we solved it.

7:03 And then we finally settled up and headed down to dalston.

7:08 This is actually my colleague and the cousin of the corner ohnon the setup itself was quite tricky as well so actually because we had to we had a very short time.

7:18 So we had the shop closes at 1am that's when we were allowed to go in and the shop opens at 8 am in the morning that's when everything had to be done and set up plus no but then.

7:32 There was also a good side actually a really funny side so it it was a little bit like a child come true because we were allowed to like take products from the shelves so to eat it's like a land of milk and honey or for us and more like red bull and weird turkish chocolate bars but yeah this is inside the shop the the layout of the the components it consists of like 12 meters of led strips 10 hidden cameras and like these are actually only like all the instruments and they had all had to be connected which sorted into quite difficult wiring task and of 750 meters of cable so in this tiny shop we had to even empty out shelves to high shelves to hide all the wiring and thread it all down to the end and then we also didn't really have a lot of space because actually we didn't think about all the vegetable cartons which are normally outside the shop suddenly inside so we had to kind of climb through there and work with it yeah.

8:48 So the project was supposed to come alive at eight like I said and we this is like this picture shot shortly after eight as you can see I'm not very hopeful about this box to be moving but luckily we had actually a really really good team and made everything run shortly after then all the like people like the production people and us were hiding in a in two little storage rooms in the back.

9:23 And this was my point of view inside the shop it was a little camera which was hidden inside the fridge which was loaded with red stripe cans and we couldn't have unfortunately we couldn't have an interactive trigger for the installation to start because there's a the problem of a child being inside the shop when the experience starts for obvious issues like we are still celebrating a beer brand here.

9:51 So they have a lot of legal issues around having having it run with a child inside so the trigger was a spacebar on the computer when I saw someone would take a red striped can which like we sleep deprivation and all the like tension of messing it up was quite an underlying adrenaline rush yeah.

10:19 So this is like just quickly I can show you these are like the instruments inside the store and as you can see it's quite a ready-made mechanics we have here and but which is normally you can't really do for project but for this one it was actually quite nice and it fits actually quite well to the diy red stripe diy aesthetic yeah.

10:45 So this like how the bottle top trumpets look from the back.

10:48 So they were connected to an air compressor you can see much more pictures of the instruments in on our website or on our collaborators website but to say like this project was really really fun and especially actually only possible was an amazing team we had which was which which all where all people pulled together in the last sprint to the installation and also really. Actually exciting because of the in inability to predict the reactions of real people in this shop and having a real experience and so I just gonna finish with letting them talk some kind of ghetto thank you