Thomas Hartnell
Hello, I am a freelance creative technologist based in Bristol with a passion for developing engaging interactive products and services for the web, mobile devices and physical spaces.
With a background in product and exhibition design I have been running my own business for the past 7 years with a focus on JavaScript and iOS development. I most recently developed digital prototypes as part of the lab team at the Future Cities Catapult, an urban innovation centre using technology to help tackle the challenges facing global cities.
Selected clients: Imagination, E3 Media, Albion London, ICC Lowe.
Recent projects
Whereabouts London
Whereabouts London is an experiment in open data, seeking to reimagine the boundaries of the city by merging over 200 data sets about the way we live. Featured in The Economist and TimeOut.
I worked as part of a team of designers, technologists and data scientists to build this API backed AngularJS app, allowing you to explore London's new boundaries.
Launch site
Sensor explorer prototypes
To help visualise the live data feeds from a newly installed air quality sensor network I developed several browser based prototypes using AngularJS and the Rickshaw graphing library for D3.
To provide a simplified data set to the front end app I created a proxy in Lua using APITools to perform on the fly transformations of the API responses.
View article
Lean Startup Weekend @ Future Everything 2015
I assisted one of the winning teams of the Lean Startup Hackathon at this year's Future Everything festival to build a prototype of their concept, a service to connect citizens with local councils.
In a short 3 day sprint working alongside a UX specialist I developed a hybrid HTML5 mobile app for iOS with a NodeJS/MongoDB backend for data collection which the team were then able to demo to festival goers.
View article
Urban Datastore
Bourne out of a research project into the many different types of data user, the Urban Datastore seeks to simplify the discovery and consumption of open data sources.
This ongoing prototype needed a flexible server-side architecture which the team could easily iterate on. After considering many options, including fully fledged data store specific CMS's, we chose the KeystoneJS web application platform which offered ultimate flexibility and frictionless updates to the data model.
Launch siteSkillset
I offer my clients a breadth and depth of knowledge honed from a lifelong interest in design & technology combined with an exploratory approach with a rapid cycle of learning and iteration, generally adapting my skills and toolkit to the job at hand. That said, I am particularly well versed in building for mobile touch devices, API design and data consumption, UI development and interface animation.
Technical experience:
AngularJS, Ansible, AWS, BDD, Canvas, CSS3, Git, HTML5, iBeacons, iOS development (including Core Data, Networking and Push Notification experience), JavaScript (Node & Browser), Objective-C, React/Flux, SASS, Vagrant
Get in touch
Please drop me an email to discuss your next project.