The story behind the Twinview brand

You might have noticed that there’s something a little different about our homepage.

Just like the platform itself, the Twinview shape brings a building to life through innovative data visualisation methods.

The unique fluid circle is linked to Newcastle University’s Urban Sciences building, the £58million development which is home to the University’s School of Computing.

Data from the building is connected to the fluid circle through a number of APIs  allowing it to react in real time to the building activity. .

“The Urban Sciences building was chosen because, at the time, it was one of the first accessible data sets with enough activity and data streams to use as a good example. It also helped that the data was publicly available!” said Adam Ward, founding director of Twinview.

“In the future, it will be possible to create different shapes with the data from different projects using the Twinview monitor module.”

A number of separate data streams from the Urban Sciences building make up the Twinview fluid circle. The colour of the shape adjusts with the temperature of the building – it’s blue when the building is colder and turns pink as the building gets warmer.

By calculating the activity of the people inside the building, the fluid circle becomes denser as the building becomes more populated and sparser as the building empties. .

In a similar way, the shape’s movements speed up and down depending on how much activity there is in the building.

“The purpose of the shape is to visualise the building’s live information in an innovative, visual manner rather than through a traditional dashboard. At a glance, you can see the building’s performance as if it were a living organism,” Adam said.

Digital artist Damien Mortini was brought on board to animate the original design, created by Gino Di Meo of creative agency Gardiner Richardson.

Mortini’s work is world-renowned in his specialist field, having collaborated on projects with global brands such as Google, Disney and Adidas in the past.