Thames Pulse

INSIGHT
London sees the Thames every day, but never sees how sick it is.

IDEA
We made the river’s health impossible to ignore.

Thames Pulse was a live data artwork projected onto Sea Containers, translating the condition of the River Thames into moving light. If the river improved, declined or stayed the same, the building responded in real time.

We also turned river health into a weather style system across digital outdoor, making water quality feel as public and checkable as the forecast.

RESULTS
We got on the BBC … (media results in case study below)

We’ve essentially projected the health of the river onto our agency’s building.

How?

We worked with digital artist Jason Bruges to create an art installation on the facade of the Sea Containers Building that indicates the level of health of the river Thames. Each evening, the lighting on the river frontage of Sea Containers changes to display a pattern that reflects the river water quality in Central London, creating a visualisation of the data taken directly from the Thames.

The artwork displays one of three patterns based on whether the water quality is improving, static or declining compared to the previous week’s data reading. 

• Declining water quality: lighting is largely green and static

• Static: lighting becomes more animated: a blue ‘wave’ sweeps across building

• Improving: pink and blue lights pulsate furiously up and down the frontage

We also created digital out of home ads that displayed real time data about the thames of the river. Mimicking a weather app layout, we drew a parallel between checking the weather forecast and checking the river health.