Daljit Singh / Digit
London
Daljit Singh is executive creative director and founding partner of Digit, one of the world’s longest-established digital agencies, Digit has worked with leading brands—Nokia, Shell, the London 2012 Olympics, and Unilever—to create award-winning interactive environments and content punctuated with humor and personality. Digit uses digital communications channels to connect brands to consumers, surprising and delighting through interaction.
A DIGIT MOTTO is that communication is about people, not technology, as evidenced by its core values: “Simple. Human. Interaction.” “This is extremely fundamental to our process,” says Singh. “We’re interested in humanizing technology, perhaps even making it look a little bit silly.
“Interactivity is quite difficult to translate into a two-dimensional sketch,” Singh admits. “Very few people work in the digital environment sketch; they largely go straight to the screen. I always encourage people to actually make a mark on paper; the rigor and process of drawing really helps—you’re not relying on a technique or a plug-in. It’s purely based on thinking.
Digital Snowglobe
Self-initiated project
“Since Digit began, we’ve always committed 10 percent of our time to self-initiated projects. This project was born out of an internal conversation about creating digital souvenirs—like the souvenirs you buy for their kitsch value. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to take something as iconic as a snow globe and make it intelligent?’ It was an opportunity to take technology and apply it to something familiar. When you pick up and shake the digital snow globe, it displays the current weather in one of fifteen cities.”
—Daljit Singh
“I tend to sketch for myself, just to express the way I think. My sketches are quite rudimentary. Sometimes I do two or three sketches, sometimes I’ll produce reams and reams, in an attempt to explain an idea.
“If you spend time sketching, it’s really quite powerful. You end up with something much more solid at the end of the project.”
Digital Aquarium
Installation
Design Museum, London
“The Digital Aquarium is a piece developed out of a conversation with Alice Rawsthorn, who at the time was the director of the Design Museum in London. They have an exhibition space called The Tank, which is essentially a glass tank overlooking the south bank of the Thames, and Alice asked me if I wanted to do something with it.
I’m a massive fan of the artist Cornelia Parker and her extraordinary exploded shed piece. The 1991 installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, consisted of a garden shed and its miscellaneous contents, which had been literally blown up by the British Army. The pieces of the exploded shed were hung as if in mid-explosion in the shape of a cube, and I thought it’d be fabulous to make a digital version. I’ve also always had a passion for fish and aquariums.
I approached our client, Motorola, and said, ‘I’d like to hang 150 of your phones in a glass tank.’ Their first thought was that I was completely mad, but they went along with it. Even though Digit at this time employed about 35 people, I ended up doing this one myself. I programmed each phone with a different ringtone, and the phone numbers appeared on the outside of the cube. When you dialed one, the phones lit up in sequence and looked like a shoal of swimming fish. The idea really comes back to our company philosophy, which is humanizing technology.”
—Daljit Singh
