Heathrow Story Project

Following Futurecity’s development of a set of cultural placemaking principles for London Heathrow Airport in 2015, Futurecity was invited by the airport to propose a project which would explore the relationship between storytelling and the Heathrow brand. The Heathrow Story Project aimed to gather thousands of stories from passengers and colleagues through SenseMaker®, a data visualisation tool, to reveal undiscovered narratives and emergent trends with applied technologies that enable scale of capture and rapid, real-time visualisation of content in ways that can be analysed for business insight. The project involved colleagues from across Heathrow departments, mobilised as project collaborators and story gatherers within their teams.

Futurecity, as the project lead, brought in two other organisations to develop the applied technologies and structure the story-gathering framework: Cognitive Edge and Storythings. Technology company Cognitive Edge developed a scalable ethnographic system deployed by the story gatherers for capturing ‘micro-narratives’ and analysing patterns created through mass capture. Storythings is a creative agency led by former BBC and Channel 4 producers that designs and produces stories across media platforms.