Digit designer, Anna Brooks, has a very slick pair of Nike Air Max trainers. They get their share of everyday wear and tear when she’s walking to and from Digit, but like most of us, she barely gets the chance to exercise while she’s at work. Until now. We’ve recently created a game to promote fitness and community across our studio, and to make the best of Anna’s trainers, and the rest of the team’s shoes, too. City Peaks Challenge, our latest R&D project, makes mountain ranges out of staircases using accessible technology. Who knew office buildings could be such valuable resources? When some Londoners look out the window, they see a cityscape. We saw the opportunity to climb Mount Everest. Anna explains:
Like most people in the design world, we at Digit spend the majority of our day sitting, which is exhausting for the mind and body. So we decided to get off our seats and use our R&D stream to encourage fitness in our studio. Digit occupies the 5th floor of Corbet Place, a ready-made exercise machine. To capitalise on this, we built a game that pushes us all to ditch the lift and use the stairs more often.
City Peaks Challenge uses RFID readers to track our stair climbing over the course of a day.
We built custom made boxes to register climbs taken using technology that everybody has in their pocket – the loyal London Oyster card. Its simple: all you have to do is tap in at the bottom using your Oyster card, climb the stairs and tap in at the top. Each person is given login details and can register at http://citypeaks.co.uk They are then able to continually track their progress against their colleagues’. Climbers are represented as flags on the faces of iconic London buildings, visualised as mountains. The first climber to place their flag on the summit conquers the mountain. Thereafter, everyone’s scores are recorded, and the whole group moves to the next city peak. When the entire cityscape has been climbed, the game resets, and the climbers compete to beat the time of the conquering mountaineer. Each climber’s overall distance climbed is also recorded, and they can compare it to mountain peaks in real life. That means Digiteers can climb Ben Nevis, Kilimanjaro and even Everest over time! As the game progresses, each player is rewarded with medals and messages of encouragement.
Digit is still in the optimistic New Year spirit, full of resolutions and de-toxing, so we thought it appropriate to launch early internally for testing. But who knows — maybe your work place could be the next to join the City Peaks Challenge.
He discussed the extensive process that was involved in building the robot, and touched on the psychology behind what we perceive as ‘human’ movement. The goal was to make the robot’s appearance inanimate while keeping its movements as human as possible so people will spend more time with the installation.
