London Under the Microscope
Nine Million Stories, One Shared Map
Client
Museum of London
Services
Data film Immersive installation Sonification
Recognitions
Brighton Digital Festival, Premiere
Kyoto Global Design Awards, Gold
Core77 Design Awards
Permanent collection, Museum of London
Links
How did the coronavirus transform London?
Commissioned by the Museum of London and supported by Arts Council England, we created a digital time capsule of the city’s first pandemic year. The aim was not just to chart events and map data, but to give Londoners a way to relive and reflect on their individual and collective experience.
The Challenge
Every Londoner lived the pandemic differently. The challenge was to hold those nine million stories together without flattening them. We designed a layered data film anchored around a surreal landcape where each second equalled one day, weaving public health data, government decisions, and daily life into a single evolving ecosystem.
The Solution
We started by asking how to honor individual experience within collective trauma. From this empathy-first approach, we built a living ecosystem where mobility shimmers across viral membranes, cases rise as peaks, deaths drift as particles, and vaccines spin halos of hope. Sound deepened every layer — heartbeats marking time, basslines pulsing with movement, new tones swelling with vaccinations. The result transforms clinical data into visceral, shared reflection.
The Impact
The project premiered at the Brighton Digital Festival and is now part of the Museum of London’s permanent collection — preserved for future generations to revisit and explore this unprecedented moment in history. It demonstrates how data humanism can turn numbers into memory, empathy, and shared reflection.
Does your data call for clarity, emotion and imagination?
Let’s shift how people see the world.
Credits
Concept, Direction, Production: Valentina D’Efilippo Developer: Arpad Ray Sonification: Duncan Geere
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