TD Explore Zone

A permanent children's gallery of six play environments, where every interactive was proved before it was built.

Client
City of Surrey

Location
Museum of Surrey, British Columbia

Opened
September 2018

Delivered by
Holman Exhibits

My role
Creative Director

Stages
Schematic Design to Handover (RIBA 2-6)

The brief

The Museum of Surrey's expansion included a new children's gallery three times the size of the one it replaced, teaching sustainability and stewardship through six local environments: river, farm and orchard, wetlands, ocean, forest, and city. Reich + Petch (now R&P Design) held the exhibition design, including the concept and the three guiding characters. Holman Exhibits was the design-build partner, taking that concept to an installed gallery in British Columbia, about 4,000 km from Holman's Toronto shop, for a fixed civic reopening on 29 September 2018.

The idea

Treat it as a learn-by-doing problem, not a display problem. Every zone was developed action-first: what the child touches, what happens, how quickly it resets, how many children can play at once, and what happens when two of them try. Then prove it: the hand-crank generators, magnetic fishing, and scarf cannon were built as working rigs and tested before production. Where a mechanism could be purely mechanical rather than powered, it was, because a hand crank fails more gracefully than a motor.

What I did

Led the creative and technical development of Holman's design-build package, taking the exhibition designer's approved concept into buildable form.
Owned the development and physical proving of the mechanical and digital interactives, and chaired prototype reviews with the museum and the designer.
Set the material and finish standard for continuous unsupervised children's use, and oversaw fabrication and the cross-country installation against a fixed opening date.

About 2,000 sq ft

six themed environments

three guiding characters

opened on programme with the expanded museum on 29 September 2018