Client: Adele Prince, Artist, London
Brief: Flash Website
url: www.trolleyspotting.co.uk
Role: Flash Development, Interactive Design

Comissioned by Adele to be presented as part of the touring art exhibition Day-to-Day Data.

The website was developed to assist Adele in documenting shopping trolleys, that she finds along her travels, which have been taken from supermarkets.

Adele writes:

“I am fascinated by the fact that these trolleys manage to travel quite some distance from their ‘home’ supermarket, and often start to acquire items as they go.”

As part of her research process she spent time in each of the three cities that she was exhibiting in and documented the sightings of trolleys in the local area. Using a Global Positioning System she collected the co-ordinates of each of the found trolleys. Also she would take a photograph, document the model and make of the trolley, the date, time, location and distance from the supermarket. I created the website which allowed Adele to display all this Trolley data on an interactive map, allowing visitors to go on a virtual trolley spotting walk and play a shopping cart game.

Homepage

Interactive Map

Trolley Data

Found Item

Items Index

Award 2007

The Trolley Spotting website has recently been in the spotlight after picking up an award in Yahoo!’s annual ‘Finds of the Year 2006‘ competition. The awards are for the most interesting and innovative websites of the year. It won the ‘Weird and Wonderful’ category.

Yahoo! wrote:

” The weird and wonderful category of Finds always throws up some great and unusual websites - and this year’s doesn’t disappoint! Top of the shortlist pops is a website art project which investigates and tracks abandoned shopping trolleys: Trolley Spotting”

This was a real favourite with the judges. They were impressed with the overall website layout and the design concept. Favourite features included easy navigation and the fact that it allows users to interact with the site and submit their ‘trolley finds’ was also a winning factor.