Blogs
September 29, 2026
How a Victorian warehouse, young people’s work and a mixed-reality visitor journey became one connected experience.
Outpouring was a five-week public exhibition created by Joe Caslin and Nerve Centre in partnership with Hamilton Robson. Joe and Nerve Centre worked with more than 120 young people from schools across Northern Ireland asking them to consider the issues most important to them today. Responses included identity, worry, belonging, connection, feeling overwhelmed and hope. The responses became visual art, writing and recorded spoken-word pieces. The work was thoughtful, emotionally direct and often strikingly wise for the age of the people making it. Outpouring welcomed the young collaborators who had made the work to the exhibition on Friday 29th May and opened to the public on Saturday 30th May, running until Sunday 5th July 2026.
Young people are frequently asked what they think, yet still made to feel that their answers sit somewhere below those of the adults around them. Outpouring set out to do more than collect their opinions. It gave those ideas physical scale, placed them in front of Belfast and its visitors, and let each young person explain the thinking and feeling behind what they had made.
When you enter Riddel’s Warehouse, you cross a set of scales once used to weigh horse-drawn carts. Above you, an old crane hangs over a central atrium, surrounded by several floors of offices and storage rooms. The building still carries the machinery, materials and even the smell of its industrial life. It feels less like an empty venue and more like a building with its own character.
For Outpouring, that character was listening.
Joe Caslin’s portrait of Mr Riddel filled the back of the atrium. He leaned into the space at the scale of the building itself, looking towards the people arriving below. Part warehouse worker and part narrator, he made the project’s purpose visible: this was a place interested in what people had to say.
Hamilton Robson’s challenge was to connect more than 120 young voices, Joe’s artwork and an untouched Victorian warehouse without allowing the technology to take over. We built a mobile AR app to bring Mr Riddel to life, help visitors find their own route through the young people’s work and eventually invite them to contribute something in return. The app was important, but it was never meant to be the center of the exhibition. Its job was to make the relationships between the people, the artwork and the building easier to see.
Outpouring began with work we had already done together.
Hamilton Robson’s relationship with Nerve Centre had grown through projects including Our Place in Space, created with Oliver Jeffers, and We Can Do Better, created with Joe Caslin.
These projects gave us more than a technical foundation. They established a way of working together: Joe brought creative ambition and a deep investment in the people at the centre of the work; Nerve Centre understood the participants, content and practical delivery; and we learned how to share decisions, solve problems and give each other room to push ideas further.
By the time Outpouring arrived, that trust was already in place. This time, the scale was larger, the venue more demanding and the technical risks greater.
The challenge sounded simple: bring together more than 120 young voices, Joe’s artwork and one enormous warehouse. My responsibility at Hamilton Robson was to turn that intention into a public experience people could walk through, understand and trust.
The app had to do much more than place a model in a room. It needed to prepare visitors for the ideas behind the exhibition, ask them the same kinds of questions the young contributors had considered, and use their answers to guide them towards work they might connect with. It had to bring Mr Riddel to life, carry a mixed-media archive, support visitor contributions and move attention between the phone and the building. All of this had to work on people’s own devices, inside a difficult venue, without making the technology feel like an interruption.
That meant holding the product and delivery questions alongside the code. I worked directly with Joe and Nerve Centre to turn creative ideas into concrete requirements, define the artwork, recordings, designs and metadata the app would need, and keep those dependencies moving against the installation schedule. When an idea depended on something physical, such as the placement of an artwork, I had to understand how it would exist in the warehouse before I could design the digital interaction around it.
I built the mobile experience in Unity using foundations and lessons from We Can Do Better, then reshaped them around Outpouring’s visitor journey. The result was a connected system spanning onboarding, the tactile questionnaire, AR activation and placement, personalised artwork and spoken word, the content library, media delivery, the two Mr Riddel scenes, the Atrium and Story Exchange. I designed most of the UI and interaction behaviour, planned the performance-capture strategy, integrated the content and character pipelines, and carried the native iOS and Android builds through testing and store release.
The reality of the warehouse shaped every decision. An interaction that worked on a development screen still had to make sense beside the installed artwork. An AR scene had to survive the real lighting and sightlines. A content strategy had to work with the connection people could actually get inside the building. I tested the experience on site, adjusted it around the physical installation, coordinated device and release QA, and continued carrying the technical work after opening.
We knew what we wanted to build: the system had to help visitors notice the young people’s work, understand where they were going and feel invited to take part. If the app drew attention away from that, it was doing too much.
Riddel’s Warehouse gave us a visual language before we designed a screen. The scales, crane, pulleys, gauges, switches and worn metal mechanisms all belonged to a time when an interface was something you pushed, pulled, turned or listened to. We wanted the app to carry some of that physical character, even though visitors would be interacting through a flat piece of glass.
Through workshops with Joe and Nerve Centre, the young people identified the project themes of identity, worry, how represented they felt by Northern Ireland, connection, feeling overwhelmed and hope. We asked visitors about the same themes during onboarding. Their answers would later shape a route through the young people’s work, but the questions also gave visitors a moment to consider their own position before encountering what somebody else had made.
A standard row of sliders would have collected the same numbers, but it would have felt detached from the exhibition. Working with Joe Caslin, we treated each question as a small industrial machine. Joe, on the Hamilton Robson Design team, developed the final visual designs, and I built the interactions in Unity so that movement, sound and haptic feedback all helped express what the question meant.
The sounds and vibrations were not a layer added after the visuals. They made each control understandable through feel. A chain made connection tangible. A pressure gauge gave overwhelm somewhere to build. Radio interference resolving into voices made the identity question feel different from choosing a number on a form. Together, the six interactions made the questionnaire feel like an opening part of the exhibition rather than administration before it.
The same principle shaped the wider journey. We used the phone to lead attention back into the warehouse, then gave visitors reasons to lower it, look around and encounter the physical work.
Visitors entered through the archway, crossed the old horse-and-cart scales and arrived beneath the central atrium. A cinema near the entrance screened local films provided by Nerve Centre’s Northern Ireland NOW project, presented in partnership with Northern Ireland Screen. From there, the stairs brought people closer to Joe’s artwork and the first AR scene.
Mr. Riddel appeared in front of the installed artwork, welcomed the visitor and explained why the young people’s work was there. He then directed them towards two large displays.
Visual artwork filled a wall to one side of the atrium. On the other, printed spoken-word pieces sat on neon pink clipboards. The answers from the opening questionnaire helped the app draw each visitor towards pieces they might relate to, while every contribution remained available to explore.
The spoken-word side used the same logic. Rather than hiding the rest of the collection, the route gave each visitor somewhere personal to begin, then left every piece open to read and hear.
The spoken-word recordings could be heard through the app or through three physical rotary telephones in the exhibition. Tiarnan Crosbie, from Hamilton Robson, engineered the phones. Dialing the number attached to a piece played the young person’s recording through the handset, giving their voice the intimate quality of a telephone call.
After exploring both displays, visitors returned to Mr Riddel for a second scene. This time he asked them to think about what they had seen and heard, then told them to look up.
Raising the phone towards the height of the atrium revealed speech bubbles floating through the space, each holding another person’s story. Some came down towards eye level, where visitors could open them and listen or watch.
The journey ended by giving the visitor a chance to add their own. At the Story Exchange, they selected a theme through a switchboard-style interaction and spoke with a conversational character through the phone.
The Story Exchange completed the loop by giving visitors a way to add their own voice. Above them, the Atrium gathered a curated field of audio and video stories into floating speech bubbles. Together, the two experiences made the warehouse feel as though it was listening, holding and returning what people had shared.
The building held the route together. Its artwork created the landmarks, its original structures shaped the displays, and its height made the final instruction to look up feel natural rather than staged.
The final week compressed the whole project into the warehouse. We had worked on Outpouring for two and a half months, but the team had only one shared week in the finished space before the young collaborators who had created the artwork and spoken-word pieces arrived on Friday at midday. In practice, that gave us about four and a half days to turn the separate parts into one exhibition.
Joe’s large artwork went up across the rear of the Atrium. Nerve Centre installed the young people’s artwork and spoken-word pieces on either side and assembled the Story Exchange booth. As each physical element found its final position, I could complete the AR work that was impossible to finish from the office: capture reference images under the warehouse lighting, tune spatial offsets, verify the Hero scenes against the installed artwork and test the visual and spoken-word overlays on their real walls.
The timing made every dependency visible. Moving a sign affected an AR anchor. A change to the display could alter the perspective guide. A media problem could surface differently between iOS and Android. I moved between spatial calibration, device QA, content checks and release builds while the rest of the exhibition continued to take shape around me.
Store review added another clock. The final iOS and Android builds still had to pass through their respective release processes. By Thursday and Friday, the artwork, app, phones and Story Exchange were finally beginning to feel like one thing, but the public deadline had not moved.
Then the doors opened.
Four hundred visitors came through from Friday to Sunday, the first three days of opening. They included the young collaborators and their families, project stakeholders, people who had travelled to see Outpouring and others who encountered it while walking through Belfast.
The opening mattered beyond the number. For five weeks, Riddel’s Warehouse opened from Thursday to Sunday, with two Late Night Art evenings and additional events. A building that had sat closed on a Belfast street was being encountered through the work of young people, with their images and voices occupying its walls, phones and open space.
Getting there was collective. Niall Kerr and Vittoria Cafolla at Nerve Centre held together the participant work, curation, administration and practical delivery. Joe Caslin and his team shaped the creative world and the purpose behind it. Within Hamilton Robson, Joe Barwise brought the questionnaire controls to their final visual form, Luke McNeice built the dual-Kinect capture software, Sean McKiernan refined Mr Riddel’s movement and supported final QA, and Tiarnan Crosbie engineered the rotary phones. My responsibility was to keep those contributions connected through the product and carry the mobile experience from planning and implementation into the warehouse, the app stores and post-launch improvement.
The app working was one part of the result. The more important test was whether the technology helped visitors find the young people’s work, listen closely and feel able to respond. When it did, the phone stopped being the centre of the experience. It became a way into the building and the conversation already happening inside it.
From the visitor’s side, the route was deliberately simple: arrive, listen, find a personal way into the young people’s work, then decide whether to add something of your own. The building gave each transition a physical place. The app connected those places without asking to become the exhibition itself.
Making that simplicity hold together was the harder story. Behind Mr Riddel, the personalised walls and the Story Exchange sat motion capture, content architecture, platform-specific packaging and an AR placement pattern built around the limits of real phones. I have separated that work into a companion technical case study, beginning with how we made Mr Riddel move.
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