Energy: Fuelling the Future

Role: Senior Designer / Contracts Administrator employed by Casson Mann the Lead Consultant Exhibition Designer
Client: Science Museum, London
Site: Second floor, East Hall, Science Museum, London
Size: 300 square metres
Completed: August 2004
Awards: Design Week winning award for Best Exhibition Design 2005, D&AD Annual award 2005, D&AD Silver Nomination for Outstanding Achievement 2005 and International Visual Communications Awards IVCA Gold Award (Energy: Fuelling the Future gallery). D&AD Annual award 2005, D&AD Silver Nomination for Outstanding Achievement 2005 and nominated for a BAFTA Interactive Award 2005 (Energy Ring).

A permanent interactive gallery aiming to provoke critical thinking on the key scientific issues surrounding our present and future energy needs and uses. The Science Museum commissioned eleven artist / designers to produce an interactive exhibit that responded to a specific energy concept. The result was a gallery packed with engaging and novel exhibits.

The starting point was to insert an architectural enclosure onto the vast second floor balcony to distinguish the edges of the gallery, this comprised of a raised floor tray with a floating ceiling element.

It was vital that visitors could read the gallery as a cohesive whole bringing clarity to the complex, varied ideas and forms on show. The strategy was to make a series of cuts into the raised floor tray and peel out sections to create a dynamic landscape of folded planes to wrap each interactive exhibit. Each folded plane is flexible enough to incorporate each exhibits different needs while crucially binding together the series of distinct exhibits into the floor tray. Each cut derived from tangents generated from the focal point of the gallery, the ‘Do Not Touch’ exhibit. The exhibit acts like a single point of energy with all other exhibits spinning out from it.

It was also important that the gallery had a strong, visible presence to visitors entering the museums East Hall at ground floor level. The thirteen-metre diameter Energy Ring, a suspended aluminium interactive sculpture with dynamic glowing white light made up of 32,000 LED lights, signals the gallery from below. Having explored how energy powers every aspect of our lives and discovered the latest ideas on how we will change to meet our growing energy demands from the various interactive exhibits, the visitor is given the opportunity to zap their comments out into the three-storey atrium. This totemic circle is both an expression of Newtonion physics and a compelling interactive medium for visitor feedback.