Bon(s) Nadal(s)

Christmas is a pretty big deal in Barcelona, so much so that the city council has its own office dedicated to the planning of the annual festivities. For the holiday season 2021 they got in touch to ask us to come up with something big for the Plaça de la Universitat that could unite the people meandering through the streets in a time of obligatory masks and social distancing.

A series of data gates were the perfect centre piece to explores the city's diverse ways of living and understanding Christmas, but this project had several other elements that allowed us to explore our favourite setting for installations, and where DDS originated, in the public space.

Data Gates

We brought our beloved data gates to life once more, welcoming the pedestrians of Plaça de la Universitat through a tunnel of choices regarding the ever-contested, true meaning of Christmas. Their preferences were used to generate a festive poem that forever speaks of how our city felt about the idea of Christmas in the year 2021.

Data workshops

As part of the Bon(s) Nadal(s) piece we invited local kids to get involved, and ran workshops that showed them how they could answer questions by interviewing their friends, and getting creative with some simple technology to visualise what they learned.

Data Walkers

We also sent our data walkers to run around town, spreading some Christmas cheer whilst bringing the data to the people, finding out whether Barcelona was missing the heat or happy in the cold, excited for xmas or ready for the new year.

This project remains special as our largest street intervention to date. When the opportunity came up we knew right away that we could produce a bold and visible structure, with a narrative that invited curiosity from passersby.

The installation reaffirmed for us the importance of rewarding interaction, which in this case we did with the poem that was being continuously rewritten in real time according to the responses we received.