Science Museum London
Exhibition / Art Direction

A 750m squared exhibition, for 8-15 year olds, split into 6 zones. The graphics were designed to strict accessibility standards and for ease of touring, allowing for visits to dual language venues, as it will tour internationally for the next 5 years.

ZONE 1: Recruitment. Using industrial PVC curtains we created an illustrated street scene as a covert entrance.A ticket desk was disguised as a news-stand, carrying fake magazines whose mastheads reveal hidden messages.

ZONE 2: Spy Skills. Here, we created a 3-D crime comic strip. Laurence Campbell (2000AD, Wolverine) was commissioned to draw the Spymaker agent and his pair of teenage trainee spies in 9 training scenarios. Each graphic panel throws a painted shadow onto its host unit, which in turn throws a shadow onto the floor, creating the effect of viewing the zone by torchlight. A colour palette of primaries mimic the direct colours of pop art and comic strips, and is offset by monochrome detailing. We were also heavily involved in consultation and creating the graphic elements to the interactives in this zone.

ZONE 3: Spy Tech: Here the displays and interactives are housed in stylised surveillance-van structures and an oversize PC monitor — whose screen housed the main zone signage, as desktop windows. One window was created from a 2m lenticular panel of an illustrated sequence zooming in to a cityscape. Elsewhere, more formal exhibit description panels are contained in a jigsaw puzzle of primary coloured frames across one large wall.

ZONE 4: Spy World: The new spies go on their first mission into Osteck, a fictional corporation — branded as a generic international conglomerate, with no real clue to the nature of it or its business. We created the feeling of being inside the lobby of a hostile corporation with a frieze of life-size silhouettes of office workers cut from mirror acrylic, with patterns made of Osteck logos forming their clothes. These and other mirrors ensure the visitor catches glimpses of themselves wherever they look, creating a feeling of paranoia. A secret doorway leads to a surveillance room where we turned seating cubes into packing crates with screenprinted graphics and pizza box cushion pads — the debris of a prolonged stakeout.

Zone 5: Spy Futures. A secret vault holds displays of futuristic, conceptual spy gadgets. Continuing the spectrum palette introduced in the Osteck lobby, coloured industrial PVC strips clad the storage cabinets housing the exhibits. Captioning is held in luggage tags attached to the briefcase-like frames and drawer units.

Zone 6: Escape. The spies flee Osteck through an interactive body scanner, whose exterior is clad as a loading bay, with metal shutters and industrial signage. The outer side of Escape is a place to leave feedback on issues raised by the exhibition. Questions about personal responses to surveillance are asked, and to register their answer visitors raise or lower a window shutter within a cityscape diorama — each reveals a silhouette of a security guard staring back.