We recently told you on our News section about our appearance in a video podcast made by design publishers Gestalten.

And now you can watch the video here – cos we’re dead clever and know all about embedding and the interweb and stuff.

Airside recently made the trip north to Newcastle to talk at Design Event 09 and we’ve got the photos to prove it. Nat Hunter and Fred Deakin chatted to a packed crowd at DanceCity about Airside’s history and body of work, as well as our efforts to increase environmental awareness amongst the design community.

They also showed stills from one of our most recent jobs: The Power Gap, a collaboration with Demos, that is part of Design Event 09’s Think Tank exhibition at Sunderland’s Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. The exhibition runs until 23 Jan 2010.

Airside was recently approached by the Sunderland-based Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (NGCA) to take part in an exhibition entitled Think-Tank: A Marketplace of Ideas. The exhibition – part of Design Event 09, the North East’s annual design festival – sees Britain’s leading think tanks collaborate with its top designers to imagine how we might create a better nation.

Being your typical yoghurt-knitting, Guardian-reading liberal lefties, we were only too happy to be paired with the left-wing think tank Demos. Until we saw the intensely detailed statistical study on power in 21st century Britain that they wanted us to explain in a two-minute animation.

Demos had just completed a nationwide survey, the results of which were used to rate every single constituency in Britain according to a number of different social and economic aspects. Each of these aspects has an effect on the power held by individual people in each area, and by the constituencies as a whole. For Demos, this survey helped explain theoretical concepts about power as well as showing its practical implementation in 21st century Britain.

For Airside it was an epic spreadsheet of numbers with far too many digits after the decimal point (see below). They patiently explained to us what all these numbers meant. We politely nodded our heads and scratched our chins. Eventually the ideas began to sink in but as soon as we began to understand the various implications of the study, another problem arose. How could we possibly even begin to touch on these complex issues in a short animation to be displayed on a loop in an art gallery?

Obviously Demos weren’t expecting us to cover everything – they just wanted to get ordinary people thinking about the issues raised by their survey. Things like how unemployment makes individuals more dependent on state benefits, thereby reducing their political power, as they would always have to vote for the party who promised to safeguard these benefits. It follows that a region’s overall employment level affected its power and areas of high unemployment had less power and influence than those with plenty of jobs.

This was the kind of simplified explanation that helped us start to understand the study. And given that we are ordinary people, we figured this should work for everyone. We just needed a hook on which to hang our painted-by-numbers picture. The variety of different factors that could affect an individual’s power seemed to have parallels with card-based games like Top Trumps or fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. This analogy was easily extended to the world of video games where characters often have energy bars that are lowered by damage or increased by “power-ups”.

Our first script was a straightforward explanation of the different factors, such as education, wealth and employment, measured by the Demos study. It featured two characters from different regions, whose power bars would increase or decrease according to the particular score of their area. The designers began work on character design, based on simple pictograms that, besides being a classic staple of information graphics, would signify the everyman nature of the data.

But it soon became obvious, that while this approach would fulfil its function of explaining the various aspects of the survey, it was also quite boring. A series of voice-over explanations with some accompanying pieces of animation would be more like a pretty lecture and seemed unlikely to get its intended audience thinking about the subject for themselves. Another problem was that the information didn’t have any context. It was all about the here-and-now, but surely power is a subject that has concerned humanity for its entire existence?

One of the design references that Demos has brought to our first meeting was a book called Rank: Picturing Social Order 1516-2009. This was a catalogue that had accompanied a previous exhibition at NGCA collecting over 100 works of illustration and art dealing with class and social order in Britain. It is a beautiful book filled with wonderful images – and if it hadn’t been their only copy, we definitely wouldn’t have given it back – but the one that really grabbed our attention was the front cover.

The book jacket reproduced a famous etching by the 17th century French artist Abraham Bosse (see below). It had originally been the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ book, Leviathan, a profoundly famous and influential work about society and government. The main image features a king, holding symbols of power, emerging from a landscape. The king’s body and arms are made up of people. Below are other images that signify power such as castles, guns and churches. All of this got us thinking about the history of power and its development in Britain from the preserve of the few to the many. This was the context we needed.

We had now gone from worrying about how to explain the Demos study in two minutes of animation, to deciding to not only do that, but to include a brief history of power to boot. Our next script began with this brief and irreverent introduction before moving onto the computer game style power bar explanation of the study. Further discussions with Demos lead us to pare down the latter aspects into the two main concepts explained in the final film: Resilience and Agency.

From a design point of view, this first appeared like a drastic change. However the pictogram characters that we had developed proved very adaptable and soon they were being fitted with cavemen beards and bishop’s miters. Taking another cue from Bosse’s Leviathan cover we decided do away with the power bar and instead use symbols of power to visually represent the concepts of Resilience and Agency. So each historical figure holds corresponding instruments such as a sword and shield or a crucifix and bible, which transform into a mobile phone and briefcase when we reach the modern age.

With the script and design in place, we were finally able to explain some of the implications of Demos’ statistical survey to ordinary people and get them thinking about the contemporary nature of power. Now all we needed to do was make sure they watched it. The final animation needed to be engaging, interesting and amusing so as to attract the attention of a naturally wandering gallery audience. Fortunately, this is the fun bit.

However the production budget was very small and we were running out of time before the exhibition opened. So big thanks to our amazing animators Jimi Newport and Robert Milne whose underpaid, long hours of hard work added dollops of humour and intelligence to the final film. Thanks also to Suzanne Cave for her persuasive voice-over, Philip Pinsky for the perfect sound effects and Factory for putting all the sound together.

The Power Gap is currently showing at NGCA in Sunderland as part of their Think-Tank: A Marketplace of Ideas exhibition. The show runs until 23 Jan 2010.

Blood! Mwaah-ha-ha-ha-hah!

Halloween may be over for another year, but that hasn’t stopped Airside stocking up on a pint of blood.

But what – I hear you ask – do we need this for? Are we taking our True Blood watching parties a tad too seriously? Perhaps we need a blood transfusion in order to continue with our decade-long commitment to hedonism, a la Keith Richards? Or is a previously downtrodden and put-upon girl about to be crowned Airside Queen at this year’s Christmas party, and a couple of resentful losers want to drench her in blood as revenge?

Actually it’s none of the above. The fake blood is part of a live action shoot for a new information film we’re making for NHS Prison Services. The shoot takes place tomorrow, so we’ll have some more photos and information for you soon. In the meantime, if you spy any Airsiders frantically rubbing their hands and crying “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!”, try not to be alarmed.