Consultancy and management
The Science of Survival is the latest blockbuster exhibition from the The Science of..., which opened in London in April 2008. After London, it will tour various sites around the world. We provided consultancy to create a personalized visitor tracking system for the exhibition. This uses RfID technology to create a record of each visitor's progress and choices throughout the exhibition. At the end of their visit people can watch as their exhibition experience is added to a "future landscape" which shows the choices of all visitors.
The Science of... is a company which specialises in creating innovative and exciting touring exhibitions. When they tackled the subject of spying they wanted a high tech James Bond feel with lots of gadgets. We provided consultancy to help them design and commision a wide range of exhibits including the Face scanner shown above. The Science of Spying was launched at both the Science Museum in London and The Children's Museum of Indianapolis in March 2007. In just over 7 months, it was visited by more than 350,000 people.
The Wellcome Trust has developed its former headquarters in Euston Road into a vibrant new public venue for London. Amongst other attractions the building houses the Medicine Now exhibition, dedicated to telling some of the stories of science and medicine since 1930. The trust is keen to provide an stimulating and imaginative exhibition and I worked with artists and designers on several exhibits which include face transformation and iris recognition (shown above).
In March 2006 the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh opened the Connect gallery. The £1m gallery contains a wide variety of iconic objects and mechanical and computer based interactive exhibits. As software manager for the gallery I delivered 17 computer exhibits, created by 5 different contractors. Highlights included driving with the full size F1 simulator and playing with the intelligent robot colony.
The Fashion gallery is an £1m addition to Snibston discovery park in Leicestershire. Although the gallery is the largest fashion display outside London the curators wanted some way of showing the extent of their collections that were still in storage. I provided consultancy to enable the commisioning of several kiosks and the design of suitable software.
Tate Modern has been running several trial tours using small handheld computers which will culminate in the launch of a full scale tour of all the collection displays in May 2006. I provided consultancy to ensure that the museum considered all of the options available and used best practice in the development of the tour.
Energy - Fuelling the future opened in July 2004 at the Science Museum in London. The exhibition contains over 30 innovative computer based exhibits created by a wide range of innovative artists and designers. Highlights include an exhibit which gives you an electric shock, a 14m high ring lined with LED lights and an exhibit that you control by dancing. I managed all the technical aspects of the gallery including the extensive website which was awarded the IVCA Gold award for "Best website". The gallery also won the Design Week "Best Exhibition Design" award.
The innovative Save system allowed visitors to the Science Museum to create their own personal webpage and use it to save images from a variety of different exhibits. Visitors use fingerprint scanning to identify themselves to the system and over 500,000 visitors used the system to create a web page. I managed the whole system which involved over fifteen different external contractors, cutting edge technology and extensive evaluation.