The other day week month the GDS design team popped over to the V&A to look at the Heatherwick Exhibition. After that we crossed the road and went to the Google Chrome Web Lab at the Science Museum.
I love Heatherwick. So clever, so original, so playful, so British. The exhibition, like almost all design exhibitions, suffers from being too small, but if you take that as a given it's well worth a visit. It closes at the end of September. You should go.
Google Chrome Web Lab is a "a series of interactive Chrome Experiments made by Google that bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life". Basically a load of web enable moving stuff. You can scan your face and get a robot to draw it in the sand. You can play the drums using a drag and drop touch screen interface. All good, all interesting and all very good at making a physical internet experience which is no mean feat.
There's also some deeper thinking around the "work is being done here" ideas that we've see James Bridle working on recently. They've done a good job of making the invisible parts of the internet visible. There's a neat bit where you google an image and then on a huge map it tells you where in the world that image is kept on a server. Interesting.
I was expecting it to be good. What I wasn't expecting was how beautiful it was. Beautiful machine. Gorgeous graphics and lovely colours. Again - you should go.
Comments