Raving Slabs: Taking an Interactive Street Activation Live for 3
Woody Cook, creating a tune
We had two and a half weeks from brief to delivery on this one.
That kind of turnaround is only possible because of how we're set up. We're a lean team, not a big agency with layers of sign-off between an idea and it actually happening, which means budgets stretch further, and the team at Tin Man could reach us directly. That direct line let us iterate on ideas fast and turn feedback around quickly, even against a genuinely short timeline.
It also meant a fair few 3am starts and weekends in the run-up. Honestly, that was no hardship. We take real, personal responsibility for the outcome of everything we build, and this one had us properly excited. We wanted something excellent for Tin Man and for 3, and we wanted it on time.
We were thrilled to bring Raving Slabs, an interactive, pressure-sensitive dance floor, to the streets for 3, the UK mobile network, working through their agency Tin Man Comms, as a public activation designed to stop passers-by in their tracks and get them making music with their feet.
What Is Raving Slabs?
Raving Slabs was built as the centrepiece of 3's Let Fun In campaign. Research commissioned by 3 found that Brits are craving more spontaneity, but life keeps getting in the way. On average, it takes nine days to turn a "shall we?" in the group chat into an actual plan, and a lot of those plans never happen at all. Raving Slabs was 3's answer: drop a genuine, unplanned moment of fun straight into someone's Monday commute, no group chat required.
At its heart, the installation itself is deceptively simple: step on a pad, trigger a sound. Eighteen individually wired pads, each mapped to its own audio loop, with LED lighting that responds live to what's playing. Get a few people moving across the grid at once, and you've got a crowd building a track together, one footstep at a time, no instructions needed, no app to download, just the floor and your feet.
The 2am Start
An early start!
It was a one-day-only installation, live from 7am to 6pm on Monday 24 August, at One New Change near St Paul's, free for anyone passing by to step on and play. Public activations like this live or die on being ready before anyone arrives, so the day began well before dawn. The crew left Newbury at 2am for a 5am install slot, working against the clock to get eighteen pads wired, tested, and lit before the streets woke up.
It's the kind of start that only makes sense in hindsight. Everything came together exactly on schedule, and by the time the doors opened, the installation was live, tested, and working perfectly. No last-minute scrambles, no dead pads. Just a floor, ready to play.
A Day on the Street
From there, the day belonged to the public. Raving Slabs proved to be exactly what it was built for. People passing by stopped, stepped on, and stayed. Strangers ended up making music together, one pad at a time, with no prompting beyond curiosity.
3 brought in DJ Woody Cook, son of Fatboy Slim and Zoe Ball, to curate the sounds for every pad, so each footstep was triggering a loop he'd chosen himself. As he put it, "the magic is always in the unexpected", which is about as good a summary of Raving Slabs as any.
Moments of spontaneous music, created by passers-by.
Exhausting, and Very Much Worth It
By the end of it, it was a long day on very little sleep, but a genuinely fun one, and one we're proud of. Seeing something we built get people smiling, dancing, and making music together on a public street is exactly why we do this.
Huge thanks to Tin Man Comms for bringing us onto this one, and to the team at 3 for such a fun brief to work from. We're looking forward to working with both again over the coming months.
