The Telegraph is the media sponsor of the onedotzero festival, currently running on London’s south bank. There’s an interview with “Wieden + Ken Neddy” on their site about the work we’ve been doing for the festival’s visual materials.

It says:

Each year onedotzero work with a creative agency to develop a unique identity
for the festival and which forms part of their installation programme. Last
year they worked with troika, who created a digital zoetrope which exhibited
at the adventures in motion festival and formed the visual identity for all
the festival’s visual materials. This year, onedotzero have invited creative
advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy to create a new interactive piece, which
has been inspired by social networks and the community that sits around
onedotzero.

1./ How did you become involved in this year’s onedotzero_adventures in
motion festival and what has your role been?

Tony Davidson, Wieden + Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, has been a huge
fan of onedotzero for many years. This year, he discussed W+K creating the
brand identity for the 2009 festival with onedotzero’s creative director
Shane Walter. It was a fantastic opportunity for W+K to tackle a branding
brief but also to refresh how onedotzero communicated with its fans. As an
agency we are always looking to challenge ourselves by working in new ways
that are beyond traditional advertising channels. This year alone we have
designed windows for Selfridges department store, launched our very own
product range and now have designed a unique generative transmedia identity,
which manifests itself into an interactive experience.

(It must have been Ken Neddy who used the words ‘unique generative transmedia’. Blimey.)

2./ As an approach by onedotzero, it’s quite an open and innovative
design brief and takes the conventional idea of branding or
marketing into a whole different space. What was most exciting about being
asked to work with them?

We think the fact that onedotzero is an independent festival gave us the
opportunity to be really free and open in terms of the idea we had. Also,
this year, onedotzero was very keen to harness the power of their global fan
base which in turn gave us the idea to aggregate the online buzz about the
festival and the events.

3./ How did you decide to respond and what was the idea you came up with?
Can you talk a bit about the process of idea to end result?

Good ideas come from good insights or ‘truths’ as we like to call them. We
soon realised that onedotzero has a huge online community so we wanted to
celebrate, harness and utilise what was being said.

We were given two hours to come up with a concept. The idea came about the
constant online conversations people were having about moving image and
especially the upcoming onedotzero festival. We had a sense that the
festival was like a magnet for all kinds of conversations in and around
moving image, so we wondered how we could go about visualizing this, by
pulling in all this information from the online social networks. We explored
this idea by using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): the APIs allow us to gather specific information being talked about onedotzero
from all online networks.

We narrowed the search down to Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr and blogs. We
really liked the idea of the identity having a magnetic quality with which
it pulled in all this information. So we started talking about magnetic
poles and ribbons of conversations that would flow into the identity to
create it. To make the 2009/2010 identity create further impact, we wanted
to colour code the digital strands of conversation as well. We then started
talking to Karsten Schimdt, our computational designer, about what was
actually possible. With Karsten, we created a real-time, living and
breathing, generative application, from which all visual communication is made. The posters are effectively screen grabs and we recorded the action
to capture the footage for the festival trailer. It’s the first time we all
had to work with generative design like this. It made it very interesting to
say the least.

In order to develop this theme into a visual identity we started to look at
how the onedotzero logo was constructed. As the typeface is very angular,
this led to a sketch where all the lines forming the letters had been
extended from each corner out off the page. Looking at this sketch made
sense of the idea of ‘onedotzero’ being at the centre of the conversation –
the graphic being built by all the threads of data containing the keyword
‘onedotzero’ coming together.

4./ Can you talk about more about the social networks and online groups,
communities and networks related to onedotzero that you have got involved?
How does this work?

onedotzero’s fan base is huge. And people nowadays talk, converse, comment and
debate in many different ways and to larger audiences. Conversation has
never been so exciting and also so fragmented. What is really interesting is
that there are so many growing fields in design right now – data
visualisation, generative art, programming and architecture are all starting
to merge together as design as the tools and technology become more
mainstream.

5./ How can people interact with the onedotzero installation online and at
the festival itself?

There will be a 50m wide live interactive projection for the duration of the
festival on the Southbank in September. Using the new Nokia N900, visitors
will be able to create personalised messages from aggregated on-line
conversations and manipulate the projection from the device interface. It’s
ground-breaking stuff.

6./ You are involved in the event that’s being hosted around open source
and freeware – can you talk a bit more about this? What are the main debates
around this and what’s your view?

We have to give thanks to the various people who have released their software
as open source as this project is only possible because of them. This is not
just a grass roots movement, it is something that big businesses including
are looking to implement. There is this mindset that giving things away is
tantamount to losing potential profits but in fact it is opening the doors to
new customers as you let them play in their own way. People are curious and
if you give them tools then they’ll build captivating experiences. Fingers
crossed they are also nice enough to share back the fruits of their labour!

7./ Are you involved in any other aspects of the festival itself and if so,
what are you going to be doing?

We are involved in a panel discussion about this year’s identity, where we will go in depth into our process and show some behind-the-scenes content:
the successes and the failures.

8./ Can you pick out a few festival highlights for this year’s edition of
adventures in motion at the BFI? What are you most excited about seeing
yourselves?

The live interactive installation powered by Nokia and showcasing their new
device will be amazing. Never has onedotzero’s brand identity been affected
live by the public during a festival. Seeing people’s reactions will be
great. Also the first showing of ‘Up’ in 3D will be great fun.

9./ onedotzero is particularly good at examining new trends, predicting
future talent and showcasing creativity at the forefront of digital
innovation. Where do you think creative technology is at the moment and what
trends and new ideas can you see currently coming through?

We think the merge between our online lives and our real lives is blurring.
When you start integrating the two together, things are going to get really
interesting.