Merry Christmas from Dentsu London

Behind the scenes…

We were inspired by the University of Illinois' experiments with making silver conductive ink:

However, I wasn't allowed to buy a centrifuge, so we thought we'd experiment with what's available off the shelf from your local friendly electronic component supplier. Could we make a Christmas card with a self-contained circuit?

After a lot of research with various silver inks and paints, we found a conductive ink pen that was the easiest to control. The other challenge was making an interactive circuit using as few components as possible that could run off a watch battery.

It wasn't possible to use traditional electronic components as they're too hard to attach to paper. We're using surface-mount electronic components – they're more normally found on the circuit boards in your consumer electronics: they're designed to be placed by robots and soldered on in an oven. Instead we're gluing them to paper by hand and drawing a circuit between them. The main problem is that they're tiny, so we had to find ways to handle them and place them easily.