Home / Case studies / A public science venue in a special administrative region
Five interactive experience systems covering food, meteorology, epidemic prevention, school and transport.
A public science venue whose visitors are mainly families and school groups, with a wide age range and short attention spans.
The difficulty with these venues is this: content must be understood at a glance, operation must be learned in one step, and knowledge points still have to stick. Plain display boards get ignored, and screens alone are no different from a phone.
The venue also required unified delivery across themes, so that each theme is not sourced from a separate supplier and operations do not fragment later.
Delivered five custom interactive experience systems: food safety interactive education, a lightning-safety sandbox, a campus safety sandbox, epidemic prevention and school bus safety.
Every system separates the control terminal from the display terminal: staff control it from a tablet while the large screen displays, preventing visitors from operating it by mistake.
Interaction format is chosen by theme: touch-screen quizzes for food safety, sandbox projection for lightning safety, a hazard-hunt game for campus safety, process simulation for epidemic prevention, and an immersive scenario for school bus safety.
The five systems connect to a unified central control back end, which can switch them on and off, monitor their status and export visitor data.
The table below lists this project's technical elements so clients can verify them independently.
Project stories without constraints are fiction. This section sets out four constraints: time, site, staffing and compliance.
These constraints directly shape the solution; every problem under 'Key challenges' below is forced out by one of them.
It is not “we worked hard”; it is “what the problem looked like, how we solved it, and what it cost”.
This section is for peers. If you are doing something similar, these points will save you a few detours.
For public exhibits, text instructions should be optional, not mandatory.
In multi-vendor projects, agree a unified interface in the contract, or coordination costs later will be extremely high.
Venue projects must assume the network is unreliable.
Talking only about successes is unconvincing. This section covers what we got wrong or did too late.
Doing it again, we would put a unified control interface into the tender requirements instead of coordinating after all five systems were installed. That mistake cost an extra month.
We did not give enough thought to older visitors. Accessibility is not just a large-font mode; it also covers interaction habits, reaction time and contrast. The next version will include dedicated age-friendly testing.
The workload of content updates was underestimated. The popular-science content for five themes has to track policy and scientific progress every year, and there is no ongoing staffing for it — a latent risk.