| Studio | precious design studio |
|---|---|
| Client | republica GmbH |
| Year | 2012 |
| Responsibilities | Installation Art, Visual Identity, Print Design, Webdesign, Motion Design |
| Team | Michael Schieben, Christophe Stoll, Johannes Schardt, David Gwiasda, Philipp Granzin |
Working on the 2011 edition of re:publica – Europe’s largest conference for social media, digital culture and net politics – was an extreme experience. Extremely stressful, extremely fun, extremely annoying, and extremely rewarding in the end.
After the dust settled, we weren’t sure, if we wanted to be involved in the following year. But when Tanja and Johnny from re:publica asked us again, we all felt an itch and said yes. It turned out to be even more extreme than the year before.
One thing that got us excited for another roller coaster ride was the new location. Instead of using already equipped and predefined spaces as in the years before, the conference moved to Station Berlin, a former freight railway station. When we visited the space for the first time, we were flabbergasted. And scared shitless. The halls were enormous. And so empty.
The cosy entrance area.
The hall were the main stage was build.
We had total freedom about the design. Just the conference motto was set: ACTION. It was the year after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. These movements were initiated or strongly amplified by internet communication, but led to real world protests — visible action.
Inspired by this theme, one of the first images that came to our minds were people doing something physical, getting their hands dirty, sweating. At an event were the majority of attendees is looking at their laptops or smart phones constantly — blogging, tweeting, emailing — we didn’t want to add more screens to stare at. Instead our goal was to transfer the virtual to the physical space and create some visible action.
One of the obligatory things at a conference like this is a twitter wall, a place where all the tweets about the event are collected and visualised. The year before we turned the twitter wall into a color war game with tweets serving as building blocks for a generative thematic map. It was displayed at the large screen on the main stage.
But this year we didn’t want the tweets to appear on a screen.
Our concept was rather sketchy when we first presented it to the re:publica team: “We will print out all the tweets and put them on a huge wall!” Luckily they knew us from the year before. Otherwise they probably would have considered looking for a new design partner. But instead of questioning our sanity, they heard us out. They understood what we were aiming for and trusted us enough to erect a 14 x 3 meter scaffolding construction right in the middle of the most busy area of the location.
We asked for something big, we got something gigantic: A 14 x 3 meter wall.