POKE LONDON (UK)

Related Projects: Belgrade Design Week Festival 2009

Belgrade Design week unlike so may other city design events has a wonderfully essential vibe about it. Nothing pretentious in the air but big bags of energy and enthusiasm. It feels like the Serbs haven't already decided what design is and so are open and ready to riff off the ideas that come in to sharp focus over these precious days. The city itself has a gritty charm about it which complements the event perfectly.

Poke is a creative company. A creative company that focuses on inventing and making interactive things.

Most of the work you’ll see if you look in POKE’s portfolio is web based. Mainly because, as they say, the Internet is the biggest and most interesting space we can play in right now. And the web is the bit that gives us the most opportunity to do genuinely creative things.

But POKE is not just interested in doing creative things for the sake of it. POKE is motivated by inventing creative ways to use all of this good stuff to do things better. Better for businesses and better for people who use the things we make.

Some of the clients POKE worked for are: Topshop, BBC Top Speed, J.Lindeberg, Alexander McQueen, Jamie Oliver, Rimmel…

Running in the morning through the city (down what the germans call a fussgangerzone) and being amazed by all the grand empty old buildings that reminded me of my Berlin beginnings. Grafitti on buildings. Lovely broken walls with acne'd facades from decades of reverse engineering. Discovering that all the ships on the river were party boats and open till the morning. Sweating so much in one of the clubs, my phone got messed up. Losing phone in said club. Visiting belgrade police station to report a then stolen phone to a twenty-something cop with a doctor's lab coat, listening to Rammstein (loudly) while hacking out my report on a pre-electric typewriter that looked (and sounded) as if it was from some era before typewriters were invented.   Thinking of Naked Lunch. Thinking of Die-Hard. Listening to architects talk about porous facades. Thinking of old smart bombs. Imagining the flash and crunch of several floors of reinforced concrete collapsing in on themselves. Wondering why I'm the only interactive guy here. Why are there so many beautiful women in Belgrade? Why are there so many beautiful women in Belgrade?!

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