Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

Photography by Karl Randay

I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in Plus - Birmingham’s international design festival for over a year now. As part of the run up to October, when the festival is running for the second time, we wanted to produce some additional work to show what’s happening in terms of design in our fair city.

The result is Illuminate - an interactive light installation based on around 120 variable brightness light strips. It’s currently installed in Moor St. station in the centre of Birmingham, UK, and today is the last day. If you haven’t seen it, either pop down today, or wait for more news on where it’s being installed next.

Plus is a collaborative success story in many ways - three design agencies Clusta, Fluid and 3form joined forces with Typevents who are well known for their international typography events. Illuminate is a good example of many collaborators working together and producing a singular result, rather than what I’ve seen happen on other projects where the result can be a mismatch of different ideas.

I’m not sure who’s was the original ‘idea’ for the piece, but beyond talking around the concept of producing a light-based interactive installation, my involvement has been mainly diverted to working on the new Plus site (launching soon). So all credit goes to Typevents for putting in a huge amount of effort to realise an idea, especially Alexandre Parré who apparently still can’t feel his fingertips from wiring up all of the lights.

Bobby Bird of Higher Intelligence Agency fame produced the unique interactive audio/visual control environment using MAX/MSP (a piece of software not for the faint-hearted!) and there are apparently plans to extend the interactivity for the next installation.