UM Productions is a division of Umbrellium dedicated to our commercial and cultural clients around the world, including an agency, an airport and a world-renowned theatre, helping turn their visions into a tangible reality.
Our clients typically come to us with a general idea or theme, and we work to make that vision real. We use the full capacity of our production team (including creative technologists, designers and software developers) to engineer and fabricate bespoke hardware and software solutions that fit our clients’ requirements.
We do this by building from the very start and using a series of experiential and functional prototypes that are increasingly sophisticated to test, hypothesise, explore and eventually deploy a production-ready system. We work more rapidly than other creative technology companies because we have built up a huge ‘back catalog’ of projects and toolkits that can be repurposed.
• H&M
In 2015, It’s Istanbul asked us to help them bring to life the facade of a new H&M flagship store and so we repurposed the Mini-Burble to act as a temporary air-filled light sculpture that could play animations and videos across its surface, as well as respond to the DJ’s music. Our production team not only built the new software and necessary hardware, but also went out to Istanbul to install and manage the structure during the Grand Opening Event.
• Principled Design / Bless
We were asked by Principled Design to help make a scarf being developed in collaboration with fashion designers Bless, adding an interactive technological component, and we used our open source WearOn platform to get up and running in no time. We worked on both the hardware and the software that controlled the scarf, and mapped out the technical architecture for a future version that could use machine learning to evolve its behaviour in response to the wearer’s movements.
• Changi Airport
Often, when a complex project kicks off, we will use an Urban Innovation Toolkit workshop with a client to help build a shared vision prior to setting out on the design and build process. For example, when we first started working with Changi Airport in 2017, the Toolkit helped all the teams get on the same page and understand the challenges and opportunities of their existing IT systems before moving on to a much deeper design and build phase.