To design and develop a touring physical-digital exhibition for South Gloucestershire County Council as part of the wider Know Your Place heritage mapping project, drawing on the collections and archives of more than twenty content partners to create a new kind of local history experience that could travel to the communities whose stories it tells.

The exhibition needed to be easy to transport, simple to install, and capable of working in venues as varied as museums, country houses, libraries and cathedrals, while connecting seamlessly to the existing Know Your Place online heritage map.

Core Narrative Development | Content Development | Stakeholder Workshops | Exhibition Design | Digital Platform Development | Ci Platform

We began by working with more than twenty content partners, local museums, collections and archives, through a co-creative workshop process, developing resources and templates that trained partner teams to transform their archive materials into engaging digital stories.

We built a tailored digital storytelling platform using our Ci system, hosting all content within an interactive hotspot map that linked seamlessly to the Know Your Place online heritage mapping project.

Working with Hotrod Creations, we designed and built the LightCube™, four bespoke illuminated interactive installations with integrated touchscreens, built to a flatpack design that could be transported in a small van, assembled by two people in around twenty minutes, and powered by nothing more than a standard mains socket and WiFi connection.

The LightCubes travelled to more than sixteen venues across the West of England, museums, country houses, libraries and Salisbury Cathedral, before being broken up and finding permanent homes in heritage centres and public libraries.

Content partners, local museums, archives and collections, are typically rich in material and less well-equipped with the tools and skills to turn that material into experiences that general audiences will genuinely engage with.

That gap is itself a significant opportunity: the workshops we ran were not just a production method but a capacity-building process, leaving partner organisations more capable of telling their own stories than they were before the project began.

The LightCube™ solved a problem that most touring exhibition briefs leave unresolved: a beautiful installation that cannot be moved, assembled and operated simply will not travel.

Designing for portability from the outset was not a constraint but a creative and strategic decision that determined the reach and impact of the whole project.

Client: South Gloucestershire County Council

TGA: Core Narrative Development, Content Development, Stakeholder Workshops, Digital Platform Development, Ci Platform, Exhibition Design Integration

Partners: Hotrod Creations (LightCube™ Design and Production)