Northern Lights
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Client
National Library of Scotland
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Category
Interpretation, UI Design, Software development
What if the Scottish Enlightenment had LinkedIn? For an exhibition at the National Library of Scotland, I built an interactive exploration of the friendships, rivalries and intellectual networks that powered Edinburgh's 18th-century intellectual flowering.
For the exhibition ‘Northern Lights’, the National Library of Scotland brought many of the original transcripts and first editions from the Scottish Enlightenment together in a examination of Scotland’s great thinkers. complement the collection of objects I was commissioned to develop a hybrid digital interpretation that would exist in the exhibition and online.
The Enlightenment saw big figures, with even bigger ideas but they didn’t exist in isolation. To explore this, I structured the interpretation around the network itself, the friendships, rivalries, mentorships and disagreements that connected Edinburgh's intellectual community.
The ‘18th century LinkedIn’, was an interactive, highly granular exploration of the individual interests, relationships and formative experiences of the key figures and their muses, complemented perfectly by the caricatures of John Kay.
The interpretation illustrated the interconnected, cross-disciplinary nature of intellectual debate in that age and brought out the human side of some of the more formidable figures.
