The Weir+Wong Years

From 2010 to 2018, we used our expertise in branding, art direction, user centered design, strategic user experience architecture, coding and engineering to take ambitious, brave creative ideas and turned them into award-winning campaigns.

We sent experiments into space, inspired world-changing scientific thinking, built artificially intelligent robots, engineered cutting edge computers games, created interactive exhibitions that connect the real and online world, and created an ecommerce fashion start-up.

YOUTUBE — SPACE LAB

The brief

WEIR+WONG were challenged with creating a global competition for kids aged between 14 and 18, who were to design an experiment to be carried out on the International Space Station.

What we created

Working for Google Creative Lab EMEA and YouTube, and in partnership with Psycle Interactive and Toaster, WEIR+WONG led the production of this once in a lifetime project. We cooperated with various organisations such as Space Adventures and space agencies including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). YouTube Space Lab was a worldwide initiative that challenged 14–18 year-old students to design a science experiment that could be performed in space. The two winning experiments were conducted aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed on YouTube. Space Lab is part of YouTube’s larger commitment to highlighting and providing access to the wealth of educational content available on YouTube as well as Lenovo’s focus on equipping students with 21st century skills via information technology.

A prestigious panel of scientists, astronauts, and educators, including renowned professor Stephen Hawking, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s Associate Administrator of Education and former Astronaut Leland Melvin, ESA Astronaut Frank De Winne, JAXA Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and Cirque du Soleil’s founder Guy Laliberté, judged the entries alongside input from the YouTube community.

Students in two age categories, 14–16 years old and 17–18 years old submitted YouTube videos describing their experiment to YouTube.com/SpaceLab.

The cool stuff

We had an amazing time managing this project! It’s not often that you get the chance in life to:

– speak to astronauts, then get them to film videos for you on the space station
– work with NASA, organising how stuff gets into space (including spiders)
– have your campaign go live with a massive PR fanfare including a Google home page promo, a Yoodle, a Youtube Masthead, PR press reports in everything ranging from the BBC to New York Times.
– have a judging panel including the likes of Stephen Hawking, as well as loads of space legends

Aside from the sheer scale of this campaign, and the incredible opportunity and prizes that were on offer for the kids (zero-g flights, astronaut training, your experiment in space, beamed live on youtube), we’re especially proud of the WebGL work that went into the Chrome Blast Off sequence.

The results

Over around 9 months, as the judging process played out, the competition received 10s of 1000s of entries and the website received millions of hits. The culmination of this was in May 2012, with a live audience in the millions watching as astronauts performed the experiments live from the ISS, hundreds of miles above us in space.

Awards

• The Webby Awards — Interactive Advertising
• D&AD — Wood Pencil
• Shortlisted Cannes Lions

CHROME - WEB LAB

The brief

The goal of Web Lab was to showcase the incredible yet often invisible workings of the modern internet. The major design opportunity was to create a synthesized physical and virtual (in-museum and online) experience where people could share a sense of social presence and collaborate on creative activities while learning about how the web works.

What we created

Web Lab is the first major museum exhibition to integrate in-museum and online visitors with equal measure. Web Lab is a groundbreaking, year-long exhibition, featuring a series of interactive Chrome Experiments that bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life. Visitors to Science Museum (London) play and learn collaboratively with online visitors through controlling physical machines, in what is truly a global museum exhibit.

Google Creative Lab hired WEIR+WONG to work as executive producers alongside a myriad of production partners; Tellart was responsible for the design, engineering, and build of the physical experiments. B-Reel created the Web Lab brand, the interface and interaction design on the web, and worked with Tellart to provide the interfaces used in-museum. Other partners included: Universal Design Studio (architectural/furniture design), Karsten Schmidt (Lab Tag/Connector design/software), and Fraser Randall (construction/installation management).

Alongside this WEIR+WONG produced all the marketing materials including banners, YouTube mastheads, digital outdoor x-track projections, printed posters and internal schwagg.

The cool stuff

Web Lab Experiments:

• Universal Orchestra: An Internet-powered eight-piece orchestra creating harmonious music
• Sketchbots: Custom-built robots able to take photographs and sketch them in sand
• Data Tracer: A tool to trace where the world’s online information is physically stored
• Teleporter: A series of web-enabled periscopes through which you can instantly access the world (including an undersea kelp forest in South Africa!)
• Lab Tag Explorer: A visualisation of all Web Lab visitors from around the world that groups and categorises participants in incredible ways.

The international audience of tourists, as well as thousands of school groups each year, made London Science Museum the perfect venue for this exhibition. It also meant that the physical experiments needed to be built for high throughput and heavy hands-on use.

The website needed to provide creative queueing solutions to manage the extremely large number of online visitors using a limited set of in-museum physical experiments. Enabling high levels of both personalization and privacy for visitors in-museum and online provided a multitude of design constraints and lead to significant user-experience design innovations.

The results

Launched for back to school time, Web Lab inspired people of all ages to learn more about how the modern web works.

Web Lab reached an audience of all ages, everywhere in the world. Annual traffic for a science museum exhibition can reach the high hundreds of thousands of visitors; Web Lab extended this to millions by integrating an online, remote control, collaborative experience. It also allowed the Science Museum to extend audience engagement as visitors continued to experiment after returning home.

During its run, over 150,000 people visited the exhibition and another 2.5 million participated online.

Awards

• Awwwards.com — Site of the Day
• Awwwards.com — Site of the Month
• Cannes Lions — Bronze in Design
• Cannes Lions — Silver in Interactive
• Eurobest x2
• IxDA — Interaction Award
• FWA — Site of the day
• FWA — Site of the Month
• The Lovie Awards — Design, Gold Winner

CHROME — SUPER SYNC SPORTS

The brief

We were challenged to create a cool, arcade style game that demonstrated the power of the Chrome browser in being able to run web-socket powered applications, that allow mobile, tablet and desktop computers to communicate in real time.

What we created

‘Chrome Experiments’ are at the heart of what Google’s Chrome technology seeks to accomplish: the inspiration of technological creativity that can push the web forward. Our overarching task was to drive awareness of Chrome for mobile and show people how the Chrome browser connects across devices, while creating a showcase for HTML5 and the innovations it offers. We wanted to create a simple user interface that would allow for a warm and playful feeling, masking the complexities of technology that has the potential to seem alienating.

Super Sync Sports is a Chrome Experiment that allows you to sync your mobile phone to your computer and use it as a game controller. Run, Cycle or Swim your way to sporting stardom using the touchscreen on your mobile device. The project was created by Google Creative Lab in collaboration with ourselves, Rafael Rozendaal and Rami Niemi.

The cool stuff

Produced using HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and the WebSockets API. Taking one step back from the details of the technology, if you could look under the hood, you would see that Chrome Super Sync Sports is a distributed application that uses node.js relay servers to ferry packets of WebSocket data between a desktop computer and several mobile devices. All that information has to travel through the Internet in a short enough space of time so the people playing the game don’t notice a delay. But the Internet does not always play nice!

We created a automatically scaling multi-node server solution that sits beneath a beautifully rendered and fun to play arcade game. A beast of a back-end!

The results

Since launch millions of people have played Super Sync Sports either by themselves or against their friends. The project is routinely used in inspiration presentations that show the power and potential of websocket technology.

The awards

• FWA — Site Of The Day
• FWA — Site of the Month
• Adobe — Cutting Edge Award
• D&AD — Wood Pencil
• D&AD — Graphite Pencil
• Awwwards.com — Site of the Day
• Awwwards.com — Site of the Month
• Awwwards.com — Honourable Mention
• The Webby’s — Best Visual Design aesthetic
• Lovies — Gold Winner
• Cannes Lions — Mobile Shortlist

GOOGLE SCIENCE FAIR

The brief

Google Science Fair is a global online competition open to students from 13 to 18 years old. Google are looking to find and inspire the next generation of scientists by getting them to submit ideas for science projects. The brief for this year’s competition specifically challenged us with improving the ratio of kids registering interest and kids actually submitting an idea.

What we created

We encouraged participants to come up with a project by combining what they love doing, with a science subject that they’re good at and applying this to a challenge that really want to explore or a problem they want to solve.

This project was led creatively by the great folks at Google Creative Lab EMEA, and we were lucky to be chosen to help lead the creative production across each strand of the project working closely with Creative Lab partners Psycle, ATP and Toaster to create a fully integrated campaign for this year’s Google Science Fair.

The cool stuff

We also collaborated closely with Google Creative Lab to create an Idea Springboard that looks at what you love, what you’re good at and a challenge you want to explore and turns this into a set of inspirational ideas for you to explore and hopefully spark off an idea for a project you’ll love working on.

The results

Once again, Science Fair inspired another generation of scientists to submit their ideas, and with help from the Ideas Springboard, the sign up metric was greatly improved upon. We’re really proud to have worked on this project and hope it produces more amazing ideas from the minds of the next generation of budding scientists.

Awards

• FWA — Site of the day

FRHANK

The brief

As part of the brand’s ongoing association with gamers — which includes the IPA Effectiveness award winning MMM3000 campaign — Kerry Foods-owned Mattessons and Saatchi & Saatchi partnered with celebrity YouTube gamer Ali A (8.1 million subscribers) to ensure credibility with this notoriously hard-to-engage audience.

In order to cement their position as ‘the number one power up for gamers’ Saatchi+Saatchi asked WEIR+WONG to create a gaming robot that would live with ALI-A and learn everything about becoming ‘a beast of a gamer’.

What we created

WEIR+WONG, Robosavvy and Hirsch and Mann have collaborated to create the world’s first socially curated, artificially intelligent gaming robot. The Fridge Raider Hunger Automated Nutritional Kit, or F.R.H.A.N.K. for short, lived with Ali-Aand hung out, played Call of Duty, learnt how to speak ‘Gamer’ and served Fridge Raiders.

The Cool stuff

F.R.H.A.N.K. is an advanced gaming robot. His key features are:

Feature 1:

He has a speech recognition unit, which allows him to respond to key phrases and questions. Initially, his ‘gaming vernacular’ wasn’t particularly up to date. To improve this, his community and fans submitted new responses through the frhank.com website. This new, socially curated vocabulary, is downloaded to his brain on a daily basis.

Feature 2:

His power unit stores a range of Fridge Raiders and F.R.H.A.N.K. offers you this during conversation if he thinks you are in need of a ‘power-up’.

Feature 3:

He detects the gameplay on Call of Duty by sniffing the signal sent from your gaming controller. He reacts to how well or how badly you are doing in the game.

Feature 4:

He is a self balancing robot and uses accelerometer technology similar to that of a Segway, in order to stay upright.

Feature 5:

He has an OpenGL animation system that allows him to convey emotion in real time, during conversations. Users on frhank.com could submit new expressions for him to learn.

Feature 6:

He has a dictionary of gestures that allow him to express himself using his arms and head movement.

Feature 7:

Users on frhank.com submitted designs for a new arm. The winning design featured a humanoid hand and a projector that allowed him to beam Playstation games onto any surface in front of him.

WEIR+WONG were brought onto this year’s project at it’s inception and worked closely alongside Saatchi+Saatchi during the conceptual phase. We developed the creative idea, designed and engineered his artificially intelligent brain including his facial animation system. In order to realise the physical development of the robot, Hirsch and Mann designed the physical look and feel of the robot, the LED armour canvas, the game console controller sniffing. And to complete the production trio, all motion control, robotics, 3D printed parts, self balancing, gesture control was created by Portuguese company Robosavvy.

The results

• 197 years worth of FRHANk videos watched on the Ali-A YouTube Channel.
• 2.5 Million Website Visitors.
• FRHANK has been taught 382,000 new words and phrases by his legion of fans.
• One optimistic punter made an anonymous bid of $4M to buy him. It was rejected.

GOOGLE — MUSEUM OF THE WORLD

The brief

Google Cultural Institute and The British Museum asked us to create an interactive experience that allowed visitors who couldn’t make it to the museum to experience some of the world’s most important and historical objects and learn how they are connected to each other.

What we created

The Museum of the World — an interactive experience through time, continents and cultures, featuring some of the most fascinating objects in human history. Users can select a time-period and a continent and then explore artifacts in a way that was previously unavailable.

The cool stuff

Using advanced WebGL (Web Graphics Library) technology and the Conteful API we created a way of displaying nodes and objects in three dimensions, across 2 million years of data. The site was underpinned with a Python/Appengine infrastructure.

The results

The website was launched globally to huge critical and public acclaim. Universities and Institutes around the world have been inspired by a fresh take on how to experience collections online.

Awards

• FWA Site of The Day
• Awwwards.com Site of the Day
• Awwwards.com Innovative Site of the year Nominee

CUSTOM

Custom is our start-up that we founded in 2014. We’d spotted a set of common problems that consumers were having when shopping online, and decided to create a product that addressed those.

The problem

The main problem consumers face when trying to discover, search for or buy fashion online is that they get the same answers to the same questions, regardless of their personal taste, size, budget or location.

It is time-consuming and inefficient to find what you’re looking for.

What we created

Custom.cm is a search engine that gives increasingly relevant suggestions for fashion. For every person and every search, you only see items in your size and style available to buy right now. Custom taps into your emotions.

The cool stuff

Why and how you shop depends on many factors. Custom helps you find more relevant choices by combining what you WANT (your search query) + what you LOVE (your brand and product preferences) + what you DO (your search behaviour)

People respond better to simple choices, so we made sure that Custom.cm lets people see the details that are important to them straight away.

The results

Custom is already proving that we are removing barriers to through the path to purchase. Our results are more relevant than many of our competitors and this is proven by the fact that people click through to a product suggestion on 50% of all searches, and signed up users who set brand and product preferences click through 3 times more than the industry average.

CHRISTIAN AID

The Brief

To create an interactive infographic that showed the history of poverty, illustrating that over the last two hundred years many countries have come out of poverty and have entered prosperous periods of development. Hopefully by showing that many countries can leave poverty behind, it will inspire others to invest in and develop the world’s remaining poor countries.

What we created

The website was produced in collaboration with BMB in London and for Christian Aid — check out povertyover.christianaid.org.uk.

For WEIR+WONG the challenge was to tell a compelling story using numbers as a starting point. We set out to visually interpret a set of data with 500 years worth of poverty level records for 285 countries. Our team of designers, developers and animators came up with something which is genuinely compelling to look at, showing us a history of the world’s poverty and allowing us to delve deeper into the data.

We really enjoyed working on this project and hope that you enjoy exploring this resource. The development process was extremely challenging and involved lots of collaboration from technologists, animators and developers in order to achieve this result.