Kin to help museum visitors get interactive in Manchester

Kin is designing a series of installations for Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry that will enable visitors to interact with, and better understand, the exhibits.

The museum called in the consultancy to present ideas to help it embrace future technologies, according to Kin partner Kevin Palmer.
Kin’s work will focus on the Revolution gallery – the main entrance to the museum’s collections, which are spread across a series of warehouse outbuildings.

When the museum reopens in October, the newly curated Revolution gallery will have a Kin-designed interactive sculpture hanging in the atrium space.

A plasma wall made up of 50 screens will play a moving museum identity and animated content explaining the connections between Manchester-designed exhibits and the city’s development through the industrial and digital revolutions.

Visitors will use barcode cards to interact with each exhibit in the space, which will then provide them with a digital scrapbook, accessible online, after they leave the museum.

A replica of one of the first modern computers, the Baby from 1948, will be on display, linked to a series of iPads, which Palmer says can communicate with it to calculate binary results.

Milling machines, looms and an electron-microscope will be made interactive by the consultancy, which will also work with a replica 1912 Avro Type F Monoplane.

When scanned, the aircraft will light up from within, so visitors can see its timber structure under a tensile canvas. The model will move to demonstrate aerofoil wing movement and an explanatory animation will start on screen.