One of my very first jobs as a freelancer was project managing the temporary exhibition InMotion for the Edinburgh Science Festival. 

I worked with the Festival staff from December 2011 to help them turn their creative ideas into real physical exhibits. I brought suitable designers on-board (Stuart Kerr and Chris Peters), and the exhibit build company (FifeX). I worked with all the exhibition partners, keeping to a challenging budget, and getting all the elements into position for the big day. It was a challenging but really fun project.

Finally, after a lot of hard work from everybody, the exhibition ‘boxes’ were delivered to the Museum after closing on Wednesday night, set up and then wrapped up in big ribbons and bows until the opening party on Thursday night.

Everyday from 30 March until the 15 April, InMotion took pride of place in the Grand Gallery at the National Museum of Scotland, allowing visitors to discover the science of human movement through a series of workshops, performances and interactive exhibits.

InMotion was quite unique in that it was part festival, part exhibition, part workshop and part performance space. An exhibition run by a science festival is quite different to any other exhibition; the exhibits were designed not only to be highly interactive but also to have quite a high level of facilitation from the science festival’s fantastic team of ‘science communicators’.

You can see the communicators in blue t-shirts in many of these photos, but what you can’t see in a photo is the sheer energy and enthusiasm they brought to the activities. All day every day the team engaged with visitors who flocked to the museum during a rainy Easter break in numbers that rivaled those seen in the first month after the re-opening.

The team tirelessly engaged, enthused, explained, encouraged and inspired and their contribution to the successful visitor experience should not be underestimated.