GE Annual Reports transformed more than a century of corporate archival material into an interactive installation for the original GE headquarters in Connecticut. The project combined archive research, custom digitization tooling, data tagging, and interface design to make a dense historical collection explorable through a nine-screen touch installation.
Challenge
- Take mundane raw materials — annual reports — and make them engaging to a whole new audience
Approach
- Spend days locked in the GE corporate archives
- Build custom book digitization software to scan the archive safely
- Tag the archive by notable themes
Outcome
- A tool allowing you to explore the 100+ years of GE history through its annual reports
- Installed on a matrix of nine touch screens installed in the original GE headquarters in Connecticut
Discovery
I quickly realized that these weren’t just reports — they were a history of business, finance, law, and technology. Even the printing technology advanced from year to year.
Prototyping
Investigations in how to bring some of these smaller narratives to light. At Fathom these kinds of porjects were always fluid collaborations between designers and developers within shared code repos. No one wore only one hat.
Installation
