Peter Reichard

“Ask Peter!” is always a good piece of advice when the question is whether something could work or not. As Technical Director in the senior management team Peter Reichard is in charge of every possible form of technology. His special focus is on physical computing, in other words facilitating new connections between code and the real world. 

Is it possible to control a Carrera slot car racing set via the Internet? Can you turn a whole shop window into a touch screen? Can a piano self-destruct or can a tree show how bad the air is? If you ask Peter, then the answer would be yes, at least you can try it out and build a prototype because Peter is a practical man. So you do tend to see him fiddling around with his electric screwdriver and soldering iron more than sitting at his computer. 

Peter Reichard started at Scholz & Volkmer as a designer in 1998.His very first project was a presentation to board members for Jürgen Schrempp who was Head of Mercedes-Benz at the time. Over the following years, he increasingly found himself programming and worked for various clients on numerous multi-award-winning projects such as the USM website “eleven22”, which won the Grand Prix award in Cannes in 1999. The back-up for the site at that time, Peter remembers, could be found on a 3.5” disk! 

The “Carrera Live Race” was the start of something that would be common thread running through Peter Reichard’s work: Live events on the Internet. With the live race it was possible to sit at home and remotely control the Carrera slot cars on the race track which was connected via Arduino. Many different projects of a similar character followed. At many inter-active live transmissions for Mercedes-Benz and Panasonic, people at home could visit the IAA or the IFA virtually, ask questions and be shown products. At the art event “Fluxus Piano Interactivities”  

Internet users could mishandle a piano with saws, hammers and bricks. However, the most sophisticated live project was for the Formula 1 Mercedes GP Petronas racing team, in which the racing car cockpit data was sent from the track to an app in real time - as a second screen for motor sports fans. A current example of a typical Peter Reichart project is NOXmas, in which air pollution levels from the German Ministry of the Environment are spectacularly presented in various lighting installations.

As Director of Technology at Scholz & Volkmer, Peter Reichard also looks after the agency’s own “Equipment park” which consists of a 3D printer, a drone, VR equipment, a vast number of cameras and an array of other technical gadgets. This collection is of course added to all the time to keep it state of the art, checked for its usability, and shown to clients during what is known as “Digital Days”. So in future too, when the question arises whether something is technically possible, the answer will still be: “Ask Peter”.