The N2 room is one of three pieces created to decorate the meeting rooms of the new offices of Mendeley/Elsevier at the Alphabeta Building in London’s Finsbury Square. The three rooms are mainly used by internal technical teams to discuss projects. Mendeley wanted some whimsical illustrations that reminded employees of their users, and also incorporated some of the Mendeley code. The artworks illustrate the difficulty that scientific researchers have finding the papers that they want to, as shown by researchers fishing for topics (Nitrogen) and using Claw Grab machines (Hydrogen).
Finding the right paper in a sea of articles can be tricky. Mendeley’s algorithm extracts relevant metadata from papers to assist researchers with paper searches. Analysis of the data of papers already in a researcher’s library also allows the algorithm to suggest papers that they might want to read next. The hooks attached to metadata in the illustration are attached to strings that are made up of the original Mendeley application code.
