We had to find a way to interact with the visitor that was reactive to where they were within the gallery space without interfering or pulling attention from the physical onto their devices. Therefore we needed to utilize an approach where visitors were in control of the interaction experience, and allowed them to pick and choose which exhibit to engage in, rather than having content being pushed to them.

With this in mind we chose to implement a mobile experience, where visitors could simply pick up, without limitation, an NFC enabled mobile device which was preloaded with the Design of the Year app. At various points within the exhibition visitors could reach-out and tap for more information, in the same way they’d reach out and touch a product in a store or at home. Thereby leaving them in total control and not interrupting their enjoyment of the exhibition with unnecessary

The implementation was split into three strands, physical, app and analytics platform and was all performed over a 2 month period prior to the September launch.

The overall implementation of the project was a very close collaboration with the museum to ensure that all aspects were in line with the overall design guidelines for the museum, maintaining the visual continuity, look and feel. The focus on quality meant only category winners were included within the app, this gave the opportunity to include rich digital assets for a subset of the overall number of exhibits.

The placement took over the whole third floor of the museum with the device furniture and instructions front and centre, and tap stands located through the physical space. It was known at the outset that the lifetime of the exhibit would be 7 months consequently the technology was designed to be managed as much as possible remotely.

• 7896 Visitors Used the Experience – approximately 31% of the museums overall visitor base in the same period

• 213520 Minutes of App Usage – nearly 180 days of consecutive usage

• 19392 total exhibit interactions – NFC taps performed.

• Increase in average stay duration of 25% - 19mins –> 24 mins

• 6395 Survey Responses – 81% visitors responded to a survey