Troika is a design studio based in London that works with graphic design, product design, technology development, sculptural projects, and interactive installations. Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki, and Sebastien Noel founded Troika in 2003. They are also the authors of the book Digital by Design (Thames and Hudson).

Where do you think the boundary between fine art and design is located with regard to new media art or interactive art? Is this a relevant or important question for you?

Troika Design Studios: We describe ourselves as an art and design studio, but wouldn’t describe ourselves as new media artists or interactive artists. Although terms like new media art and interactive art are very vague, they seem rather limiting because they define the work you are making by the tools you are using.

Although any attempt to classify new movements is interesting, we enjoy being part of a movement that has so far escaped any coinage and defines itself through blurring the boundaries between established genres and disciplines.

Can you address the notion of collaboration throughout the conception and execution of a project? Is the collaboration something continuous or something more akin to a traditional software development practice where each team does its part and hands it to the next team? How do you handle communicating across disciplines?

We are continuously working on a range of self-initiated and commissioned projects, which follow similar processes from concept to design development to production and implementation.

All three partners take part in the concept stage after which the project is led by one partner who is responsible for the planning, the communication with the client, and the division of work between the partners as well as other collaborators. Tasks are naturally distributed according to different skill sets. We collaborate with a close-knit network of specialists, which we employ depending on the project. An iterative process is crucial to our way of working, which happens internally between the team members as much as with our clients and manufacturers.

Communicating across disciplines takes time and practice. It’s literally like learning a different language. We were fortunate enough to follow each other’s developments throughout the master’s degree program at Royal College of Art in London, which helped to develop a common vocabulary.

Can you give a little background on the history of Troika?

Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, and Eva Rucki founded Troika in 2003, after we graduated from the Royal College of Art. Since then we have worked for clients such as MTV International, British Airways, the BBC, Warner Music UK, Thames and Hudson, and the London Science Museum.

Although the work of our studio spans various disciplines from graphics to products to installations, a lot of the themes—like creative use of technology and cross-fertilization between the art and design disciplines—are recurring subjects.

Since the beginning we have frequently taken part in national and international exhibitions and conferences, including Get it Louder (in 2007 in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing), Responsive (in 2007 in Tokyo), the Science of Spying (in 2007 at the Science Museum London), Noise of Art (in 2007 at Tate Britain, London), Design and the Elastic Mind (in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), Volume(s) (in Casino Luxembourg, Forum d’art contemporain), and ExperimentaDesign (in Amsterdam in 2008).

Are there are good precedents for companies or collectives working across fine art and design that influenced you and the way that you structured Troika?

Collectives like Tomato and Antirom were certainly an influence during our studies, because of their multidisciplinary approach and because they were working as collectives rather than presenting themselves as one person (who employs others to complement his or her skill set), as is often the case in the product design world. But their mix of skills was quite different from ours, and the commercial landscape in which they started out had changed quite a bit when we set up our studio.

Troika’s structure developed naturally based on the backgrounds of the founding members and a shared interest in the creative use of technology and cross-fertilization between the art and design disciplines.

These interests are apparent in our work for the Science Museum (Identity for the Science Museum Art Projects galleries and concept products for the Spymaker exhibition, which examine the future of spy technologies) as much as in our forthcoming book Digital by Design. It’s an overview of the fusion of digital technology and art and design production, as in our installation work for Terminal 5 of the Heathrow airport.

Troika was commissioned by Artwise Curators to create All the Time in the World, a 22m long electroluminescent wall that marks the entrance to the First and Concorde Galleries lounges in the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

Do you consider yourselves part of a lineage of artists and designers or of a school of design in any way?

Troika is part of a generation of artists and designers who creatively engage with technology in order to provoke questions, experiment, and explore its potentials and impacts. A lot of these artists grew up during the transient phase where analog technologies were gradually replaced—the record players and View-Master. As such, they understand the benefits, appeal, and importance of the materiality and the tangible component of technologies versus the all-digital, immaterial, which prevailed at the start of the digital era.

The influence of sci-fi—from films such as Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, Scott’s Blade Runner, Orwell’s novel 1984 (Plume), Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (Ace), Ballard’s collection of short stories, or the more popular Star Wars, to name but a few—sparked a willingness to think and create in technological terms, finding new avenues and alternative futures. A lot of artists working in this field share a more or less intense fascination for technology itself, its potentials for artistic expression, and its social and cultural impacts. Other notable influences include kinetic and media art, the counterculture of the ’80s and ’90s (more precisely in DJ culture, which influenced the process in terms of remixing), hacker communities (as the Berlin-based Computer Chaos Club), street art, and graffiti.

How do you view what I’ve been calling “the ecology of new media art,” by which I mean economic possibilities, exhibition opportunities, exchange of dialogue, and so on. Do you see it forming interesting discussions and fueling work or not? Do you have a sense of how it this is different across different parts of the world?

The general approach of artist and designers working in this field is very collaborative. Sharing knowledge as well as the joy of discovery online as well as at conferences is a common feature and encourages a constant exchange and debate. Part of the reason may be that a lot of small structures are operating in this field that have adopted a flexible and associative process, pulling together the right competences when needed, rather than growing into a bigger apparatus in order to ensure their autonomy.

Who are the artists and designers working today that you are most interested in?

We have just written a book called Digital by Design that features artists and designers who employ technology in unexpected, playful, disruptive, functional, or critical ways. What was most challenging, but also most interesting, to us when writing the book was that the works we selected successfully escape any coinage such as media art or interactive design. The selected artists and designers have one thing in common: an eagerness to explore the intersection between science, art, design, and technology in the search for humanist values, humor, magic, and sensory experiences.

We love Daniel Rozin’s Mechanical Mirrors for the tangible beauty, Dunne and Raby’s work for their critical approach toward design, and Ron Arad’s sense of exploring the new. What we look for in all the works we admire is the increasingly lacking desire for thought, enjoyment, quality, and craftsmanship.

A piece like Sonic Marshmallows appears at first very nontechnological, but it allows you to think about things that are enabled by technology without using any electronics or power. Can you talk a little about how a piece like that fits in with the rest of your works and how you see it functioning in relation to people’s desires to interact with things?

We are fascinated by technology—being kinetic, optical, sonic, or electronic—and its impact on people. So, a lot of our work is informed by technology, but it is not a prerequisite. What we are striving for in our work is immediacy. We want our works to trigger emotions or thoughts like a story or film might do, and we love when art, magic, and science appear to be crossing paths. Sonic Marshmallows is a great example; it’s technology in its purest form. Older technologies, especially the ones directly linked to natural optical and acoustic phenomena, carry a very simple and innate beauty that reveal their depth and magical surprise once you experience them. We see Sonic Marshmallows more as a manifestation of people’s desire to interact with each other, rather than with things. Sonic Marshmallows can be used only in conjunction with another user. Sound mirrors were originally used on the coast of Kent to detect incoming enemy planes, not far from the location were Sonic Marshmallows is installed now. We used the same technology in a way that enables people to communicate with each other instead.

Sonic Marshmallows, acoustic sculptures for Wat Tyler Country Park

You’ve created the electroprobe, a device for listening to electrical currents that surround us in our everyday environment. Can you talk a little bit about working with this tool and why you’ve come back to this theme several times?

We first exhibited the electroprobes as an exploration tool for the immediate surrounding; for example, in galleries people could discover the sounds produced by the radio magnetic radiations of the surrounding lamps, closed-circuit TV cameras, electricity wires, and so on.

We then became interested in the wide range of sounds that electroprobes can pick up, including sounds from objects, which might not appear in your common gallery context, such as LED boards, fans, fridges, and so on. In order to enable visitors to hear the varied sounds of their radio magnetic environment, we curated installations of electronic objects.

When we were invited by the British Council to China, we decided to make a locationspecific sculpture using only electronics from the Chinese markets. The objects were arranged according to the sounds they were producing to create one big electromagnetic organ. The user becomes in a certain sense the composer because he will determine which sounds become audible through navigating this electromagnetic soundscape with the aid of the electroprobe.

Magnetic Guangzhou, an installation for the Electroprobes in China

Do you approach conceiving of a print work differently than you approach conceiving of an interactive piece?

Projects that are most interesting to us are the ones where we can bring all media together: print, installation, product, and animation. The main difference between one work or another is usually whether it is something that is applied or not—something that is about answering a brief or creating a work that is self-initiated. We approach all in the same way. We want to engage and surprise people through sensory experiences or through making them think. And this counts for a piece of print as much as for an installation.

Greyworld, business cards

This is a very broad question, so feel free to answer however you like. What are the fundamental rules for designing an interaction?

In Troika’s practice, interaction design or experience design might have a very different meaning than, for instance, for an interaction designer working in product development.

Troika strives to engage people on more intuitive and emotional levels. A good example is our kinetic sculpture Cloud. Supported by the organic fluid movement of its surface, it provokes associations of a living creature. The flicking sound of a flip dot, which is a small circle that is flipped over to create a sort of pixel and which was a technology used in old airport displays, touches on memories of traveling when you were a child.

Some people have asked us if Cloud is interactive if it moves only when you walk by. Our answer to that is that interaction can mean many things and goes far beyond touching a button and getting a response once you have done so. A sculpture such as Cloud is not based on such a linear approach.

Nevertheless, designing interactivity is an interesting task. Martin Heidegger sums it up pretty well. He describes that the only time he really noticed his hammer was when it was broken and that he was thinking about the nail instead of the hammer when the hammer was working properly. It is about making the interface or the object invisible and tapping into what people already know, where they are able to recognize form and behavior without having to think about it.

Cloud, a digital sculpture For British Airways Terminal 5

What software or hardware tools do you use, and how do you feel they shape your vision or your working process?

We use the common 2D, 3D, and animation software packages. We draw and write to formulate our ideas. We have a workshop in which we experiment and build our prototypes and smaller pieces.

Our ideas and designs are to a great extent influenced by the tools we are using. Try to formulate a concept without words! We believe that good craftsmanship and intimate knowledge of your field is essential. This counts for digital/virtual solutions as much as tangible solutions.

A piece like All the Time in the World has an extremely complicated technological element, a beautiful typeface, an element of motion graphics, and a conceptual element that plays on locations well-known and well-known but rarely considered. How do all these ideas come together in a piece? Is it born more of necessity or a desire to be able to shape all aspects of a piece?

Our approach is quite holistic, and we find it an enriching and creatively challenging experience to develop the different aspects of a project.

All the Time in the World developed—like many of our projects—in a nonlinear fashion. We had created the Firefly typeface after we learned about the possibilities of electroluminescent technology. When British Airways commissioned for an art installation for its reception hall in T5 using the Firefly display, we started from the semantics of the location to develop the content for the installation.

We are investigating possibilities for technological innovation—mainly in the form of reappropriating existing technologies—on an everyday basis. At the same time, we are very aware of the contexts in which these technologies were previously used or developed, and this informs the way we will use it in our projects. For example, the flip dot technology used in Cloud stems from the signage boards used in the ’70s and ’80s in train stations and evokes notions of travel. When those little inventions and contextspecific concepts come together in an installation, it creates a multilayered end result, which carries meaning on more than one level.

For All the Time in the World Troika developed a new typology of electroluminescent display, called Firefly, which relies on a custom-designed segmented typeface (patent pending.)

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Excerpted from Programming Interactivity: A Designer's Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks by Joshua Noble. 978-0-596-15414-1. O'Reilly Media. Copyright © 2009 Joshua Noble. All rights reserved. Used with permission.