Technology Will Save Us design kits that contain all the parts and tools needed to build objects such as simple speakers or musical instruments. "A lot of the time it's hard to navigate online resources in order to find all the things you need to make things with technology," says Koby.

Other kits include conductive playdough and programmable bike lights, all sold both online and at small pop-up kiosks they call Haberdasheries for Technology. "These are shops within shops where we can give people information about our kits," she says.

Created with designer Yuri Suzuki, their Radio Kit includes small circuits that fit together like a puzzle to form a working radio. "It contains PCB boards that you can piece together to create connections for a radio," Koby says.

Hirshmann then describes the workshops run by the studio in the local area, which include teaching groups how to wire a plug, solder and create small circuits. "We're interested in creating these workshop experiences where people can come in and join us as a community," he says.

They also arrange "meetings with experts" where they ask people in the community about specific needs that could be solved using simple technologies. "We had a gentleman called Mr Lewis who couldn't hear his doorbell and he wanted to see it," says Hirshmann. The solution was to hook up LEDs from their musical instrument kit to his doorbell so they flashed when it rang. "The key thing to remember is that he was one member in a community that potentially had a similar need, it's possible that this solution could help a lot of people," he says.

The studio also organises technology demonstrations and live "teardowns" of products. "We get an expert to rip apart something that's everyday in our lives, like a toaster, and explain what goes into this thing that makes it so good at making toast," says Hirshmann. "It's really fascinating to understand what goes into the stuff in our lives."

To conclude, he demonstrates light glasses built from their Bright Eyes Kit, which are sunglasses with LED video screens instead of lenses.

Dezeen's Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices. Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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In the movie, the We Made That founders look at why they've been working on "things you never get taught in [architecture] school," with projects like Fantasticology, a group of landscape interventions in the London 2012 Olympic Park.

Movie image: wildflower meadows in the Olympic Park
Above: Fantasticology facts on benches in the Olympic Park

Working with architect Tomas Klassnik and artist Riitta Ikonen, they planted wildflower meadows in the footprints of the buildings that previously occupied the site.

"Essentially it becomes a floral memorial to some of those things that were there before, and are no longer," says Lewis. "We just love the idea that there’s some recognition of that past. The majority of the flowers are annuals, so next year they’ll fade and self-seed, disperse and become less distinct."

Above: site of wildflower meadows in the Olympic Park

Plaques engraved with unusual facts were also inserted into benches around the Olympic Park as part of the same project.

They collected the facts through workshops with local people, finding out that sharks, for example, go into a trance if they're flipped over. "There was a kid in the park debating with his dad how you turn a shark upside down," says Lewis. "I love that people can have that kind of interaction with their surroundings, and see something different in their surroundings than this spick and span park."

Above: copies of The Unlimited Edition newspaper

The duo also worked on a neighbourhood newspaper, The Unlimited Edition, which reported on local news from the High Street 2012 route stretching from Aldgate to Stratford.

"We're interested in engaging people with tactics for making change," says Goodall. "If you say to someone, 'we're interested in talking about urbanism and policy', they glaze over. But if you hand out a newspaper on the high street for free and talk about someone's neighbourhood, they're interested in having that conversation."

Above: proposal for The Wild Kingdom play area in Newham

Finally, they discuss a project to build an outdoor play area in Newham, east London. "With this, there's a number of engagement activities and planned workshops and what we call 'slow build'," says Goodall. "That's an important aspect – not just delivering something, finishing it and walking away. It's a longer term involvement with these projects."

Goodall and Lewis founded We Made That in 2006 as an architecture and design studio working within the public realm.

Dezeen's Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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Gort begins his presentation with an image by documentary photographer Mishka Henner showing onlookers at a gay pride parade in the English town of Oldham (above). "I’ve put this in here because I think it’s a really priceless photograph," says Gort, who has worked with Henner on a number of projects.

"He uses the camera to strike up conversations with people, and to try and capture the places as well," explains Gort. "That’s something that’s really important about our work, that whole idea of valuing what exists to start with."

He goes on to show two drawings of London high streets (above and below) made by Fiona Scott, the architect with whom he founded Gort Scott Architects in 2007.

"I think these drawings start to show some of the amazing characterfulness and juxtapositions of different uses and building types that exist [on London's high streets]," he says.

"A lot of people say the high street is dead," he continues, "[but] nearly 60% of all London’s employment goes on near high streets, and there’s an amazing richness and vitality that is far from dead, actually. If you go down to Tooting, or up to Cricklewood, you’ll find a high street that isn’t about shopping – it’s about the representation of local communities in that area."

The high street is a "physical device" where communities meet and where "collisions and conflicts happen", he adds.

Introducing the Tottenham Public Room project (above) in north London, he says: "It's a public space that can be used to try and encourage a trading of skills. Volunteers from the Tottenham area are trying to help a disenfranchised community, which was really splintered after the riots [in 2011]."

"We want to do buildings that have an impact, but we realise we have to operate a little bit by stealth in terms of getting into different areas," he notes.

He goes on to introduce two very different forms of architecture that have inspired his practice, noting that he is most of all interested in atmosphere.

"Atmosphere is dictated by the structure, the scale, the light, the materiality, the orientation – where you’re placed within the city itself – and how all those things start to combine to have an impact on the kind of space," he says, comparing a grand palace in Genoa (above) with a room of scaffolding props (below).

He finishes by introducing his firm's most challenging project to date, a house on the Isle of Man (below). "Whereas Tottenham Public Room was going to be built for a temporary setting, this is going to hopefully last in a really harsh climate on the southern tip of the Isle of Man for a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years," he says.

After experimenting with lots of different materials, the architects realised that the most successful buildings on the island were made out of traditional stone. "We thought, why not just build this thing out of stone [and] use a Welsh slate roof," he says. "To just work with that palette of materials was really rewarding."

Dezeen's Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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Above: Young's Unknown Fields project with Kate Davies

In the movie, Liam Young looks back at his work with Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, the studio he runs with Darryl Chen, and Unknown Fields, an experimental project with designer and writer Kate Davies. Young explains his work is influenced by the history of futurology and how the "diverse visions of yesterday's tomorrows" can explore the consequences of emerging technologies.

Above: deforestation reveals an ancient town in the rainforest

For one Unknown Fields project, Young travelled to the Amazon rainforest and discovered that an area we think of as an untouched wilderness was once a cultivated landscape.

Above: "CO2 scrubbers" for the Amazon

"Instead of a jungle, what we actually find is a large garden," he says, explaining how deforestation has revealed ditches in the rainforest floor left behind by an ancient village whose residents cultivated the local flora.

Above: "migrating forests" for the Amazon

The studio then invented fantastical creatures that might find a home in the deforested areas of the Amazon, such as "CO2 scrubbers" that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen more efficiently than the trees that once stood there and "migrating forests" that can travel as the climate changes.

Above: rat poison spread across the Galapagos Islands

He also visited the Galapagos Islands where he encountered "an absurd fight for an idealised nature", with rat poison dumped from helicopters and an "eco sniper" killing goats that destroy the habitats of endangered turtles.

Above: seed dispersal robot

Exploring this use of technology to maintain a "natural" environment, Young came up with a seed dispersal robot that floats like a plant spore in the wind, dropping native Galapagos seeds on the ground.

Above: poison cloud robot

He also designed a machine that sprays poisonous clouds to kill invasive rodent populations, guided by a "Judas rodent" that herds the rats into packs before the poison is released.

Above: "Judas rodent" to guide the poison cloud robot

In Australia, Young visited an enormous gold mine where he discovered that it takes 200 trucks of excavated rock to produce just one gold bar.

Above: Kalgoorlie Super Pit in Western Australia

A 3D computer image of the mine is connected to real-time information about the price of gold, dictating how much is excavated each day.

Above: computer image of Kalgoorlie Super Pit

He finishes with Electronic Countermeasures, a Tomorrow's Thoughts Today project that saw a flock of flying robots create temporary file-sharing networks above the city.

Above: a gold bar being weighed

"It’s kind of like an aerial Napster, he says. "They perform this balletic aerial choreography, drifting through the sky, part nomadic infrastructure and part nomadic swarm."

Above: Electronic Countermeasures

"What we’ve realised is that there’s no nature anymore – at least not in the sense that we culturally define it," he concludes. "What there is, is technology. Engineered networks, augmented environments, invisible fields – infrastructure has exploded into bits, to roam the earth in an architecture of everywhere."

Above: Electronic Countermeasures

Dezeen's Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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The studio aims to make science more accessible to people by creating environments in which they can experience the processes and structures first-hand, on an understandable scale. "We are trying to create artworks in the city that bring cutting-edge research in biology and in energy into the public sphere, into a park in the centre of the city, so people can actually relate to this research and get an understanding of what is about to happen to them."

Since 2003, Gmachl and Rachel Wingfield's Hackney-based studio loop.pH has combined science and design for projects ranging from community enhancement schemes in Hackney to installations at London's Kensington Palace (above and below).

"The relationship with science is at the heart of what we do because we are very hungry researchers," says Gmachl.

"We've developed illuminated, self-supporting animated architectural textiles using an old textile technique, lace making, that's brought up to an architectural scale then combined with parametric design software to create some very ephemeral light installations," he says.

Their research into metabolisms and energy flows began with a collaboration with British Nobel Prize-winning scientist John Walker, which led to large-scale interpretations of his molecular research and metabolic machines. "We took one of our textile techniques, based on taking a material and charging it up with energy, to create a molecular structure on a human scale," he explains.

Collaboration is also important to Loop.pH's work and Gmachl describes how creating artworks with residents on an east London estate to transform a notorious drug spot into a useable space was about "planting seeds" in the community. "It's not about telling people what to do, it's about trying to help find the opportunities and develop the skills so they can be practised," he says.

"For a designer this is actually a difficult process, because designing is the thing that we consider ourselves to be best at and it's the thing that we really want to do so to give up that level of control, to allow other people to design and to make the choices, is something that we have to learn to overcome."

Based in Stoke Newington, the Loop.pH studio is just around the corner from Dezeen's offices. Dezeen's Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney. See all our stories about designs by Loop.pH »

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