The Schiffshebewerk (Boat Lift) in Henrichenburg is an outstanding piece of Prussian engineering. It allowed channel boats to be lifted 14 meters to continue their travel, using a clever combination of Archimedes’s principle and early electrical motors, all housed in an elegant and decorated architecture. Now a part of a industrial heritage park, the Hebewerk has its own museum, which has an interesting story to tell, of course about boats but also about Germany’s industrial past, when carbon used to travel around the Ruhr on water. For this museum I was tasked to carry the production of multimedia elements.
With about 20 interactive media stations, the production spawned through a long time and lots of exchanges with the curators and the designers. One big point was the “Nauticum Quiz”, a deceivingly simple series of quiz stations, based on touchscreens. Under the hood there was the need to develop a system that could quickly identify the visitor throughout the quiz, in order to sum up the points won in the different stations, and to gratify them through the path with a series of achievements and levels-up.
The visitors received a uniquely coded card at the entrance, and with that they could “log” into the different stations and carry their score with them through the exhibition. The card itself served as a gadget, on which different stickers, representing the game’s levels, could be attached to testify the achieved status.
The concept for the characters and the graphics, which revolved around the central “Captain Henry” and two young adjuvants, was developed together with Yokanima, which produced all the animations also for the explanatory clips that illustrate how the Hebewerk works, what Archimedes discovered, etc.
The stations are unobtrusively place around the existing exhibits and the new structures of the museum. Another simple but effective game was an interactive drive through three channels who intersect the Hebewerk. Hours and hours of timelapse photography were recorded during an actual drive through the channel, with subsequent identification and localization of all main places (bridges, joints, cities…) that are to be seen during the journey. The visual data is then projected on the wall, with the fun factor of being able to maneuver a joystick that can accelerate the drive to almost 50x the original speed, resulting in a frenzy rocket launch through the channel system.
The elegant design from beier+wellach allows for a seamless coexistence of traditional displays, explanatory text and media surfaces that allow deeper exploration of the contents.
CREDITS
Contents, curation: Schiffsheberk Museum Henrichenburg
Concept, Museum Design: beier+wellach
Production: id3d-berlin
Media Production: Michele Pedrazzi, with Yorgos Karagiorgos (Yokanima)
