Mini Case Study

A shockingly good
hack project

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The Problem

For what we thought was ‘fun’, and to raise our profile, we decided to set up a mechanism to deliver electric shocks to people in the office whenever we were tweeted by the public.

The Solution

We used customised joke shop shock lighters to provide the shock (with some tin foil and wiring) and our tame office robot, Sid, to deliver the punishments. Each time a tweet was received, our code randomly selected a member of the Si team to electrocute.

At the moment of each shock, the iSight cameras on our iMacs took a picture of the punishment being dealt and tweeted it out to the shock dealer.

The Results

We live streamed the whole event starting at 9am on Halloween and didn't stop until after 6pm (as the US audience was starting to join in). Shocks were dealt out every minute and a posted up to Twitter for the world to see.

Queues of people formed trying to deliver electric shocks, we even heard we were being broadcast on screens in agencies in London.

We didn't sleep well that night.

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