Building on the success of last year’s Engaging Spaces showcase, we’ve returned to Retail Design Expo 2016 with a new interactive installation exploring creative collaboration.

The concept centres on interfaces activated and controlled by the audience, reflecting our philosophy that design should always be playful, accessible and engaging. Visitors are invited to place a selection of everyday objects – a box, a plant, a smartphone, a coffee pot – from a shelf onto any of four sensors to trigger bespoke film content and accompanying soundtrack layers.

Each film has been created by a different designer at D&P, offering their individual response to a specific object for an insight into the agency’s various disciplines and the people working within them. For example, a graphic designer interprets the box by unpacking her own treasure trove of inspirations – scraps of typography and pattern gathered over the years, which she looks to when starting a project – while a digital designer explores possible iterations of the cube and an interior designer assembles a physical wooden box.

The markers correspond to our four main areas of expertise – digital, graphics, interiors and strategy – and the content for each object changes to reflect this, triggered wirelessly by embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. Though the technology itself is simple, the installation’s impact comes from the wealth of original content and surprising interactions. By playing with different sequences of objects, participants can exercise their own creativity by ‘remixing’ the visuals and audio, creating layered montages that explore the agency’s people, processes and creative spirit.