When you want to name your museum’s permanent exhibition, Power of Science, the experience had better live up to the billing. Alongside our frequent collaborators Thinc Design, Journey created a suite of media, interactive games and hands-on features that not only met the brief, but blurred the lines between bystander and participant, student and researcher, visitor and explorer.
Demonstrating the power of science isn’t difficult. Making it feel both simple and beyond comprehension is another thing entirely.
That challenge drove our work with the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami. Across four frontiers — Our Oceans, Our Environment, Our Bodies and Our Universe — we set out to ignite guests’ fascination with scientific processes and phenomena.
The exhibition’s focal point is a towering, three-screen, fully interactive periodic table of the elements. The experience invites guests to select objects, such as the sun and the human body, to generate a 3D animation of overlapping elements. Smaller monitors on either side encourage individual exploration. Look sharp — Easter eggs abound.
Anchoring a portion of the Our Oceans display is a rare, preserved Elkhorn coral. To illustrate this delicate organism’s life cycle, Journey 3D-scanned and projection-mapped the specimen to depict, with uncommon accuracy, its various stages of health. Visitors can toggle among parameters such as water temperature and nutrients to see how each input affects the coral — an interactive way to develop concern for fragile ocean habitats.
Given Frost’s storm-prone location, museum directors needed to educate audiences about extreme weather. We responded with an augmented reality experience that places visitors in the midst of a hurricane, helping them understand the destructive force—and real human cost—these storms can carry.
Adjacent to this feature is an interactive centering on a hurricane about to make landfall. As a stream of information flows in via LED screens, players must decide whether to stay or evacuate. Together, these interactives provide an approachable, tactile medium for learning about the dangers posed by hurricanes.
Though such features put nature’s fury into focus, it was equally important to demonstrate how careful planning can mitigate environmental catastrophe.
Build Your Own Coastline is a large tabletop interactive in which participants compete to build the best protection for a stretch of the Miami coast using three different elements: mangroves, sea walls, and palm trees. Players work within a fixed budget to buttress the shore as wave upon wave rolls in.
Many exhibition designers claim to bring learning to life. Together with our collaborators, we helped Power of Science deliver on that promise.
A free-flow kind of experience … well-grounded in scientific processes and discovery.