Applied Works has begun its realtime energy data trial with 20 UK households, in partnership with EDF Energy, made possible with funding from Innovate UK’s Energy Game Changer competition.

Energy Game Changer

In September 2016, Applied Works and EDF Energy won an R&D grant from Innovate UK’s Energy Game Changer fund, following a three-stage competitive process, and over 260 applications. With in-home smart technologies advancing at a rapid pace, the funding enables us to expand on our previous research and develop a concept that puts energy data in the hands of consumers to create new markets and change perceptions. …

Written by Joe Sharpe

Since I co-founded the company in 2004, Applied Works has enjoyed working on a fascinating spread of topics for a wide and varied list of clients — from the evolution of the sauropod dinosaurs for Nature magazine to live tracking of a North Pole speed record attempt for Ben Saunders. Having a rich mixture of stories and subjects is what feeds our creativity and studio culture. The best projects often begin with a compelling problem, that is best solved by crafting and shaping the delivery of narrative content.

We at Applied Works have a long-standing fascination with language and its roots. In fact, we have a number of R&D projects bubbling away in the studio on that theme. This post focuses on a Twitter analyser we built in 2015 (but relevant this year on the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death), which looks at the prevalence of Shakespearean words and phrases used by various Twitter accounts.

Our long-time friend and collaborator Anthony Hamelle, has the following Shakespeare words and phrases hidden within his tweets:

advertising (19), lower (2), frugal, torture, lackluster [sic], label, flawed, outbreak, fixture, critic (2)…

Last week, Applied Works were very proud to host 100%Open’s fantastic quarterly Union event at our studios in Hoxton Square, on a theme very close to our hearts, Next Generation Inspired. We helped to curate an evening of speakers talking about projects produced with for or by young people. As with all Unions, each speaker had 5 slides/5 minutes and ended with an ‘ask’ for the audience. A common theme across the talks was to get kids learning through doing and making.

Joe Sharpe & Zoë Bather, Ingreedies

Applied Works partner Joe and his wife Zoë began the evening talking about Ingreedies, and their mission to…

We are driven by curiosity, that’s what we say, and that’s exactly how we are — and we don’t shy away when this needs proving. This curious mind is what leads us to pay attention to the world around us, to sports, music, maps of London and everything else, food, quantum physics, energy, oceanic tides, public debate and politics or, in a word, to culture — and following the definition anthropologists give thereof, believe us, this makes us see impressive things, both in quantity and quality…

Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”

This curious mind accordingly led us to pay attention to one of the best…

The digital space seems to have entered into a datafest era. Let us rephrase: the digital space seems to have ushered the world into a data-based era. As a consequence many fields have been upended or challenged with new techniques, questions and opportunities.

Storytelling is among those caught by the ever growing flow of data, so much so that the subfield of datatelling has emerged and already attracts the interest of key players.

Governments — some, such as the USA, the UK or France, much more so than others — and…