The Science Museum’s forthcoming, 350m2 Energy Gallery must set a new density record for designer/artist to gallery space. As well as enlisting the usual team of exhibition and graphic designers, the museum has been grappling with the ideas of 14 designers, developers and artists brought in to create an array of almost entirely interactive exhibits.
This has proved tough, admits museum energy project leader Hannah Redler. But she says it has been an ultimately rewarding process, with various teams stretching themselves and the patience of those working alongside them. ‘There’s always going to be tension. People need to fight different corners,’ she says.
Casson Mann and Graphic Thought Facility have dealt with the tricky job of creating a cohesive exhibition design in response to the diverse installations, rather than fitting exhibits into the design concept, as is usually the case. The eventual solution, a ‘playground’ of installations – meant plenty of discussion and negotiation with the various interactive creatives.
‘They’re all personalities,’ says Casson Mann director Roger Mann. ‘Some [groups] have been really easy and some have pushed the boundaries, which is fine – it’s what we’d expect.’
When the £2m gallery opens later this month, both Mann and Redler hope that the efforts will all have been worthwhile. The gallery itself is on the second floor mezzanine of the Science Museum’s East Hall, but visitors will be able to see it from a greater distance, courtesy of the Halo, a huge wheel with a diameter of 13m, suspended vertically within the atrium.
The Halo is designed by Casson Mann and Soda to be a ‘totem’, drawing visitors up to the new gallery. It has an inner rim display of questions, visitor messages and images of exploding particles that respond to visitor input.
Aimed at seven- to-14-year-olds, the gallery is conceived as a stimulating, fun way to learn about energy usage today and in the future. The use of artists, designers and developers reflects the emphasis on carefully layered and richly textured interpretation, rather than an iconic or purely screen-based approach to display.
‘It’s [almost] entirely interactive because the theme doesn’t lend itself to objects,’ explains Science Museum head of design Tim Molloy. The alternative, he adds, would be to display, for example, part of a wind turbine blade rather than have a live link-up with a wind farm, since energy objects tend to be either huge, or really tiny particles, which don’t speak for themselves.
The results identify engaging energy stories in a cultural as well as scientific context, and then use good design to turn them into enjoyable games, says Redler. ‘We had to make sure it wasn’t just a bank of monitors,’ she says.
Casson Mann’s design treats the whole gallery like a stage-set, creating a ‘landscape’ for the interactives by cutting and folding a plywood floor covered in grey rubber.
‘I hope it’s a good, symbiotic relationship between bedding something in, but not swamping it with an over-arching concept,’ says Mann. Installations are grouped under three themes of Energy, Energy Today and Future Energy. Within this, the arrangement has the underlying rationale of exhibits aligned on tangents emanating from the central circular Do Not Touch exhibit by Christian Moeller.
GTF adds punch with its colour-coded, anodic-printed aluminium signs that lift the otherwise neutral setting. The pink, blue and yellow/green palette is expanded for a 5m-high monolith that graces the entrance, complete with an integral, randomly-timed flash gun.
It promises to be an exciting, hands-on gallery, although ironically, a non-interactive exhibit may well become the most talked-about installation. Dunne & Raby’s Is This Your Energy Future? is a provocative display of three future energy scenarios consisting of glossy, abstracted photographs by Jason Evans, and hypothetical objects.
For the vision where human waste is used for fuel, lunch boxes will be compartmentalised for poo as well as food. Another contentious scenario is for robots fuelled by blood, illustrated with an image of children feeding an animal into the television, and a radio with teddy bear- shaped pouches of blood instead of batteries.
But most exhibits are games. KRD/Robson & Jones’ Energy Shut Down is a pneumatically-operated city of tower blocks that rise up and illuminate when switched on, using the city as a metaphor for energy. The aim of the four-player game is to retain the most energy, with players battling to rescue the city engineer from a lift and working to keep hospital patients alive.
Several interactives are fairly physical. Plant/LandTransmedia’s installation on energy transfer is gesture-driven by visitors. Images are made up entirely of words, with orange used to signify energy. Spiral, meanwhile, uses dance-mat technology to explore sourcing energy from nature. AllofUs’s Modern Lifestyles mixes digital and analogue media and includes huge, 2m-high picture drums that contestants turn to select the right answer in a quiz game about energy consumption.
Blast Theory’s installation on future energy sources and their impact on the built environment rises up from the floor like a periscope. Handles on the side operate a touch-screen with a turning diorama that children use as part of the energy detective game.
But the most dramatic of them all is Moeller’s subversive electric-shock-generating totem, Do Not Touch, which illustrates (safely) the power and danger of energy.
Interactive exhibitions have the potential to flop when they break down, as demonstrated at the Millennium Dome. But the museum is confident that the Energy Gallery will stand the pace and meet its visitor targets.
‘The trick is the balance between something that’s robust and something where learning outcomes are rich,’ says Molloy. Exhibits have to meet the gallery’s five- to ten-year lifespan.
‘Some of my team have spent ages playing in the name of testing. We all tried to break [the exhibits],’ says Redler. They’ll soon be put to the real, acid test of hordes of marauding children when the gallery opens to the public.
The Science Museum’s Energy Gallery openened on 23 July 2004