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Shining Lights
The story of Scotland's lighthouses
Timeline: 8 weeks
Client: National Museums Scotland (NMS)
Value: £18k
Aim: To develop 4 interactive concepts into working, robust exhibits and install them at the National Museum of Scotland.
What we did: Working in collaboration with the NMS in-house design team, we first developed their designs for the exhibit housing into working (technical) drawings. Running alongside this, three out of the four interactives required varying degrees of prototyping, including adopting a new water-cutting technique to shape 60mm (thick) HDPE into workable 3-dimensional blocks for the lighthouses in Towers of Strength. Once water-cut the blocks were machined to create the tapered edges and polished.Re-tracing some of the difficulties of the engineers' work that we were seeking to display to the public, we ended up with some great model lighthouses that showed well the two different structural designs.Illuminating Scotland and Bright Enough required custom electronics and firmware; both of which were completed in-house and tested for a number of weeks prior to installation. Illuminating Scotland also required a highly sensitive custom 'slider' to control the 100 LEDs on the map. FifeX loves to work with Arduino, which provides a great platform for this type of project. In this case, we were able to run, evaluate and modify the code for the electronics onsite in Edinburgh, meaning that our client's requests for small changes were accomodated immediately with no fuss.During installation, it became clear that the wall was not sturdy enough for Illuminating Scotland. We quickly addressed the situation with NMS and an additional support structure was manufactured and installed before the opening.The exhibition was hugely popular and our repeated attempts to get photos of it during the normal day failed because so many people were using the exhibition constantly!
Testimonial: "We were exceptionally pleased with the products that Fifex created for our exhibition. Within a very limited time period they produced four high quality interactive exhibits that brought the exhibition to life for our visitors. We received numerous positive comments from people of all ages about the interactives, particularly the Illuminating Scotland interactive map, a unique exhibit that fulfilled our brief perfectly. The quality of the products was clear as they were still looking fresh and running smoothly after 6 months display and over 40,000 visitors. I wouldn't hesitate to work with Fifex again."
Sarah Teale, Exhibition Officer
External Link to Client's Website: http://www.nms.ac.uk/