To develop the core narrative, interpretation plan and content for the American Battle Monuments Commission Visitor Centre at the Normandy American Cemetery, Omaha Beach, working alongside lead designers HSD to ensure the narrative framework informed and integrated every dimension of the design development and media.

Interpretation Planning | Content Development | Design Integration | Memorial Experience Design

We built the interpretive approach around the voices of the people who were actually there, soldiers, medics, commanders, French Resistance fighters and, for the first time in a commemoration of this kind, German soldiers, placing testimony at the centre of the visitor experience rather than historical summary.

Robert Capa's extraordinary D-Day photographs were used at real-world scale to create immersive settings for iconic objects, hedgehog beach defences, the interior of a landing craft, placing visitors physically inside the moment. A minute-by-minute timeline of the landings across all beaches gave the experience its narrative spine, and a dedicated memorial space completed a journey that moves between the visceral and the contemplative.

The result is a visitor centre that functions equally as immersive heritage experience and as a place of quiet commemoration, used for major anniversary events and official visits.

First person testimony and present continuous tense transform historical narrative into lived experience, the difference between knowing something happened and feeling its weight. That is not a stylistic choice but a fundamental interpretive one, and it governed every content decision from the first research trip to the final label.

The decision to include German and French Resistance voices alongside Allied ones was the most significant narrative choice on the project. A commemoration that speaks only from one side honours courage without accounting for its full human context. Including every voice created a more complete and ultimately more powerful story, one that holds the complexity of D-Day with the honesty it deserves.

Client: American Battle Monuments Commission

TGA: Interpretation Planning, Content Development, Scripting, Design Integration

Partners: HSD (Exhibition Design & Production)