We've had a short project at some point recreating a station's big departure times flipboard in an ipad app; my colleagues went out there for a couple hours to just look at the thing, record background and noises, write down its behaviour and draw the small nuances and damages in the flippers and their contents. Over a weekend my colleague made a POC of the animation of a single unit, then in the next week the two of us copied that one over in a big grid to display departure times from the API. It was a really cool little project, and IIRC the managers of the organization we made it for would frequently just have it open on their desk or show it off to people.