Inspiration Everywhere

Sky Arts is a 24-hour television channel dedicated to providing viewers with a broad range of arts programming including theatrical performances, movies, documentaries and music.

The Sky Arts Ignition Series was a new initiative in 2012, that invested £1.2 million over a three year period with six leading arts organisations, to create new and ground-breaking art works, events and performances.

Government cuts to the Arts Council of England in 2011 resulted in more than 200 organisations losing their funding. A well-publicised protest and petition was led by Sir Patrick Stewart, calling for a more coherent arts policy.

After consulting with arts bodies, Sky Arts Channel Director John Cassy identified an opportunity to bring more arts to more people. He understood that arts bodies wanted the public to see their works and that Sky had a channel, the cameras and the knowhow. The Ignition Series was created to give new arts projects the funding and visibility they needed and in turn, provide Sky Arts with a vehicle with which to grow its audience.

Sir Richard Eyre, who supported the development of the Sky Arts Ignition Series, noted: “This is an exemplary partnership between a broadcaster and the arts. I hope Sky’s model will be copied. It’s to everyone’s advantage.”

The Liverpool Biennial is the largest contemporary art festival in the UK. For ten weeks every two years it commissions the most exciting artists from around the world.

Sky Arts Ignition collaborated with the American artist Doug Aitken, whose first public installation in the UK was at Tate Liverpool as part of the Biennial in 2012-2013. Entitled The Source, it asked a variety of leading arts practitioners about where their creative ideas come from. Viewers saw 4-minute video conversations with artists including Tilda Swinton, Jack Pierson, Jack White and Mike Kelley, projected inside a temporary structure on Liverpool’s historic Albert Dock built by renowned British architect David Adjaye.

Sky Arts used the Doug Aitken exhibition to launch a mobile app that inspired arts and culture fans to visit the exhibition. The app was also designed to encourage those who lived in or regularly visited cultural hubs such as London, Bristol, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh to engage more deeply with the Sky Arts channel and watch more of its content.

A large quantity of exclusive content was created for the city-wide art festival and we wanted the app to feature this content prominently during the festival. The primary aim of the app was to increase the reach of the channel by building awareness of the channel’s programming.

The Doug Aitken exhibition aimed to uncover the mystery behind great ideas and great works of art. What if we could do the same, at a much bigger scale and provide inspiration at any time and in any place?

I worked on this project with Joel Bradley, a Creative Director at Sky. Together we believed that people craved distraction - to alleviate the dull moments of waiting for someone or for something to happen. And that people were often unaware of the richness of the environment they were in, and the creative history of their surroundings.

We wanted to bring inspiring moments to uninspiring places. To surprise, lift, excite, enlighten and transform people in their everyday life, by linking their location to an artist or work of art in a way that made them see their surroundings with new eyes.

In our research we discovered many hidden facts about creative people and the work they had produced in south west London, where we were based. These location-based revelations were inspiring and surprising. We imagined a national network of ‘sparks’ — places tied to artworks that would ignite the public’s imagination and connect them more deeply to the places where they lived and worked.

We presented a strategy for how this would work to the Sky Arts team behind the sponsorship and enlisted the help of digital agency Other Media to figure out how to geotag and identify relevant culture points of interest linked to Sky Arts content.

The app experience wasn’t realized in the way I’d imagined it, because it relied on Wikipedia as a free content source with which to describe the sparks. This meant the descriptions often read as mechanical and were not crafted in a way that was brief and on brand. And the visual design was reimagined to something not as exciting or progressive as I’d have wanted. My original concepts and designs (which you can see on this page) were much better!

However, the app did achieve some success despite the execution:

· The app, which we had originally called ‘Spark’ was renamed ‘Inspiration Everywhere’ and launched with over 10,000 points of interest.

· Many ‘moments’ were delivered with a short video to demonstrate the wealth of content available on Sky Arts.

· The app encouraged people to explore the Doug Aitken exhibition and nearby points of interest with the option to record a related Sky Arts programme.

· The Doug Aitken exhibition was a huge success and viewed by over 50,000 people.

· Sky Arts won the Hollis Award for Arts Sponsorship in 2013 for its collaboration with Tate Liverpool.

· The ‘Inspiration Everywhere’ app was included in a list of the top 30 best iPhone apps by The Guardian in 2012