The Connected Places Catapult is a hotbed for urban innovation, exploring how technologies can be deployed in cities to improve health, well-being and quality of life. As long time collaborators we partnered with them to research how they can use technology to better connect with their own employees.
The Urban Innovation Centre
The Catapult building itself is a technological wonder – IoT sensors report on the physical condition of the workplace, providing data for analysis by their data science team. But this raised an interesting question – while you can know what the building's inhabitants physically experience, how can you say for certain how they feel?
An agile process
Working with the Catapult’s Innovation and Data Science teams, we prototyped and built a series of unique connected objects, each with its own behaviour. These playful and tactile connected devices are scattered throughout the building and poll employees on a series of subjective questions.
Making sense of the data
In addition to generating data, key questions to solve were how the data would be stored, accessed and analysed in a format that was useful to the Catapult’s data science team. Our sensors integrated with the Google Sheets API, each interaction instantaneously updating a Google spreadsheet over the WiFi network.