In Conversation With
Each month, Airwards chats to someone in the industry doing incredible work. We uncover what they do, what makes them tick, where they see the industry headed, and discuss positive drone use.
How digital and design are Pushing what’s Possible with drones
We focus a lot on positive, innovative, and life-saving use cases here at Airwards; the drone technology - and organisations behind it - helping improve lives. A crucial component of this life-saving tech is the digital and design aspects that go into the software eventually used by the end user, helping break new ground.
In this blog, we talk to Jacob Beckett, founder of digital innovation and production studio, Vitamin London, to explore this convergence of industries and find out how digital and design are ‘pushing the possible’ for drones.
“‘Push the Possible’ is centred around the notion that a lot of what is possible today, wasn’t possible yesterday, and the same goes for what’s possible tomorrow - it isn’t yet, today. We need to be right on the edge of what is possible in order to shift the dial and innovate properly. ”
How have drones changed the way you do digital and design?
An obvious one is video production. Previously, helicopters were used but today, thanks to drones, we can fly in smaller spaces and capture content that wasn’t open to people before.
Right now, the excitement in the digital industry is around the varying abilities of cameras that can be strapped to drones - so beyond capturing visuals, cameras that can survey land and provide precise data. For example, near our Cornwall office, there’s an agri-tech company - Perception Drones - which scans the countryside to produce maps and monitors the health of crops and plants simply by scanning them at 40 metres. With the use of drones, it doesn’t matter about the weather and they’re getting much more effective results than someone walking through a field.
Mapping that level of data to such high fidelity is where the real excitement is for digital and design. Ultimately it’s the symbiotic relationship between our industry - digital and design - and drones, which is driving the detail and fidelity. But precision is key to what we do and drones just take this data up to another level.
Your mantra at Vitamin is ‘Push the Possible’. Break this down for us?
It’s centred around the notion that a lot of what is possible today, wasn’t possible yesterday, and the same goes for what’s possible tomorrow - it isn’t yet, today. We need to be right on the edge of what is possible in order to shift the dial and innovate properly.
At Vitamin, we need to be aware of what’s available to be first to market and deploy those new ideas for clients. As the advance in drone technology has been immense, it can be hard to keep up; thankfully Airwards is a way to keep track and see the vast innovation.
‘Push the Possible’ has to be pervasive to be effective, and works on a few different levels. If you're doing big thinking, it pushes you to go that much further. But doing that by itself is not a solution because you need the follow-through to apply it, down to every tiny component. Each interaction needs to be brought to life through ‘Push the Possible’, for example, with immediate feedback, in order to make the whole product cohesive.
How is Vitamin pushing what’s possible in the drone world?
Clients come to us with problems, and it’s our job to help them solve these - usually with a technical lens and the combined support of specialists and generalists to balance the topline view with the minutiae of the detail. A lot of people are interpreting data in different ways, and quite often, we are mapping different data sets over one another to find new solutions. Drones frequently come up as part of these solutions, all of which are pushing what’s possible in a number of different industries.
I think we’re genuinely getting very close to everything being known in the world, with data points on everything. Drones have a massive part to play in data capture and, beyond that, to improve the world and help solve big problems.
One example of this is an exciting project we currently have with SkyBound Rescuer. We can’t say too much at this stage, but founder, Gemma Alcock, came to us with a very real-life problem about improving Search and Rescue efforts, and we’re now working together on something that’s never been done before. Our role is building the back-end programme that has a super user-friendly interface. We’re using learnings from B2C app creation to ensure this programme is as easy to use as possible and users feel reassured they’re making the right decision, with minimal stress, as quickly as possible. We have to be very detail-oriented; if you can shave off a few milliseconds, it could save lives.
It’s fair to say that SkyBound Rescuer will be saving lives through technology, so we’re honoured to play a part in that.
About MV
Vitamin London is a digital innovation and production studio who partners with ambitious companies to build human solutions. From strategy to websites, branding, graphic design and multimedia, Vitamin helps clients ranging from start-ups to large organisations with a vast array of work from apps to e-commerce. For more information go to www.vitaminlondon.com or contact pushthepossible@multivitamin.group.
Connect with Jacob Bekett on LinkedIn and visit MultiVitamin Group for more information.
