Digital Portfolio

A selection of some of the more creative digital projects I’ve worked on as producer or product manager/owner. I have also consulted, carried out user research, evaluation and training on a variety of digital projects, for more information see About Me.

#ItsOurTime

Launched November 2019

#ItsOurTime logo. Help your employees register to vote

So proud to be a part of this amazing project. #ItsOurTime set an open challenge to the creative industries and major employers of 18-34 year olds to mobilise young people who care about climate to register to vote in the 2019 UK General Election. I ran the Employers campaign, creating a clear user journey through a tricky offer and putting together all the content that major companies needed to get involved. The result (of our combined efforts)? More than 2.4 million 18-34 year olds registered to vote. Read the report on how we did it.

The National Centre for Computing Education

Beta launched January 2019

National Centre for Computing website screenshot

3 months from announcement to beta launch for a major new government funded initiative? Sure! With no time to recruit a full-time team, I was recruited as a temporary Senior Product Owner for Raspberry Pi (part of a wider consortium) as we built the website that would deliver teacher CPD, certification, resources and more as part of an ambitious programme to support Computing teachers. It was a challenge. You can read more about our methods and how we tried to keep the focus on the user in this blog post I wrote for launch.

The site will move on from the version I helped deliver, but you can find the current version at teachcomputing.org.

Ivandoe: the Adventure Game

Launched January 2018

Now BAFTA NOMINATED! I produced this extremely daft but also extremely fun kid’s game for Cartoon Network. Packed with mini games, episodes, collectable items and little character interactions. Hours of fun for kids! A really great project to work on too, and challenging, not least because the huge amount of content had to be localised for 17 countries.

Play the game

Read how Player Three made the game

Sharing Nature

May-October 2017

Montage of images from Sharing Nature

A lovely concept from Wellcome Collection: could they build an online Museum of Modern Nature entirely out of submissions from the public? I took over production on this online and in-gallery project just before it launched and saw it home, managing the final stages of development and launch as well as the social media and moderation.

View the archive

Empathy Deck

2016

Screenshot of Empathy Deck card with a collaged background and the statement: "Spend some time alone, But I'm so sick of my life no feeling like my own"

From the brilliant Erica Scourti, this art piece for Wellcome Collection’s Beyond Bedlam exhibition took the form of a bot that attempted to empathise with its twitter audience. Built by the also very brilliant Tom Armitage, it drew on Erica’s own diaries, horoscopes and collated imagery to offer solace to people online.

This was a fairly light touch production role for me,  focused on facilitating the work of the artist and technologist and keeping the overall project goals in sight on and track.

More about Empathy Deck from Wellcome Collection

Vice writes about the project and its implications

Erica reflects on the project

Info Age+

2014

Info Age plus app screenshot with the app name and four buttons titled "My timeline", "After dark", "Newsflash" and "Top tech"

A learning app for the Science Museum to encourage families and schools to engage with the exhibits in the Information Age gallery. Frankly, not all that successful, for a myriad of reasons, not least of which is the age-old failure to promote it, but a useful learning experience nonetheless.

See more on the Science Museum’s website

Join Southern Reach (Annihilation)

January 2014

Screenshot from Join Southern Reach showing a map on the top left, a web cam of windswept fields below, and a text box with scene setting instructions on the right

Originally a live brief on a transmedia course, after the presentation of a strong prototype this website was commissioned by 4th Estate to promote Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, now a movie. I came on board to produce this atmospheric and spooky little story with the existing team of writers and technologists.

Play an archived version of Join Southern Reach here

Buxton Museum apps

2014-2015

Screenshot of Buxton app with a black and white image of archaeologists with spades at the top, the title "The Mysterious Arbor Low" below and instructions to follow the links and listen to more information about the site

Working for Lord Cultural Resources, I produced four pilot mobile tours for Buxton Museum’s Collections in the Landscape project. I had to find a way to create four prototypes that took the museum’s local collections and situated them in Buxton town as well as two sites further afield in the Peak District, and do it for a tiny budget. To find out how I did this, you can read my blog post on the subject.

Alas, the project is no longer live, but it allowed Buxton to test the concept and go on to create a full working version in the next phase.

Artmaps

2013

A screenshot of Artmaps, with a map background and the subtitle "Putting the Tate Collection on the map"

Artmaps was a research project and collaboration between Tate and Horizon at the University of Nottingham. It was an investigation into mapping Tate’s vast collection and exploring the kind of audience interactions that this could involve. What does it mean for an artwork to be geographically located? Will people be interested in submitting their own locations? What can you do with a collection once it’s been mapped? I was involved in producing this project during my time at Tate as Producer: Interactive Media on maternity cover, along with a trial Drupal-based mobile tour for the collection gallery.

Browse Artmaps

Read more about the research project

Axon

March 2012

A screenshot of the Axon game showing a branching line connecting brightly coloured dots

One of our hit games at Wellcome Collection, commissioned by us (Danny Birchall and I), produced by me and developed by Preloaded.

Frenetic and punchy game about neuron development. Over 4 million plays and a great response online, players particularly enjoyed finding out which obscure neuron type they had managed to grow at the end.

Science subjects make brilliant games (I’ve written more about this here)

Play Axon

Magic in Modern London

November 2012

What if you could put your exhibition out into the real world? At Wellcome Collection we turned Edward Lovett’s Magic in Modern London, a collection of stories about the amulets he gathered from sellers and citizens around the city, into a geolocated treasure hunt.

“Retrace Lovett’s steps, using evocative audio and images which bring his London to life, as you search for the exact location where each amulet was collected. Retrieve each amulet to unlock its story as told to Lovett, and complete the set to reunite his collection”

Read more and download (if it’s still working) here.

High Tea

February 2011

A screenshot from High Tea, showing a "how to play" page and the instructions: "step 1, buy opium, step 2, sell opium, step 3, buy tea".

Our Wellcome Collection mega hit, High Tea. Same team as Axon, above, this was our first big foray into online casual games, and it was a doozy. Millions of plays, thousands of comments and many column inches. A proud moment.

Our evaluation caused a stir too, read that here. Headline: over 50% of players were inspired to do their own research into the subject matter after playing.

Play High Tea

BBC Spooks Interactive

November 2007

A screenshot of the Spooks Interactive game, with the title and logo overlaid on a London skyline with St Paul's cathedral and the words "We've been watching you" in the sky

Won a BAFTA for best interactive in 2008, and a Craft BAFTA too. I worked for Hoodlum and then Kudos on this project as content co-ordinator (video and stills production, script continuity etc) and production manager. This huge online game invited players to join the world of Spooks, and help the team. Also PMed the webisodes for Moving Wallpaper/Echo beach for Kudos and developed the concept for the online ARG around Spooks: Code 9.

Play Spooks Interactive (but only if you have an old version of Flash, sorry!)

However, you can watch the promo here, which includes lots of the gameplay.