Activitea

How do you measure the pulse of a design studio? For this project, we treated tea-making as a proxy for activity, conversation and momentum across the day. Jack Chalkley and I built a sensor network that tracked cups of tea and coffee made on each floor of Imagination's office, turning a small everyday ritual into a live behavioural dataset.

Working with Jack Chalkley, I designed and built the sensing setup, translating a loose cultural question into something that could be installed, maintained and understood by others. The project sat somewhere between office infrastructure, provocation and data experiment, which was exactly what made it engaging.

The system detected when a cup was held under the hot water tap long enough to make a drink, then published that event data to Cosm. From there we turned the stream into simple infographics that revealed the studio's daily rhythms of making, pausing and gathering.