Hot fifty – Dynamo London

Dynamo London is effectively a website – www.dynamolondon.org – set up in January last year by Zoe Black of New Media Knowledge and digital star Malcolm Garrett of Applied Information Group to build, among other things, a digital community in London.

Designed by Garrett and intended partly as a showcase, partly as a forum for digital creatives, the site is built on a simple format using plain text rather than imagery.

It invites visitors to put up new work that isn’t their own that they think is great and pushes the boundaries in some way, encouraging critiques from other visitors. There is also scope on the site to comment on issues of concern within the digital world.

But Dynamo London goes further than that. It also organises evening events to bring people in the digital community together to debate and network.

This aspect of the initiative reached new heights in iDesign, Dynamo London’s first day-long conference on digital issues held at the Purcell Room on London’s South Bank in September as part of the London Design Festival last year.

A year on, Garrett and Black are reviewing the site and the effectiveness of the initiative to date. So far, it has enjoyed funding from the London Development Agency, a situation that we hope will continue as part of the LDA’s commitment to digital design.