How can museums use digital interactive exhibits to engage young people with cutting-edgescientific research? This was our challenge at National Museum of Scotland in the exhibition Parasites: Battle for Survival.

The other key partners involved in the development were the students and teachers of a local secondary school in Edinburgh. The exhibition curator and a museum learning officer visited the school multiple times with different exhibition ideas to consult the target audience. This gave us valuable input to develop the digital exhibits.

Reflecting on the whole process, I have drawn out these five top tips:

My first task was to review the briefs. We had ideas for five digital interactive exhibits plus one large-scale AV. One of the most interesting things about this exhibition is that the topic is not simple. There are five parasites, each of which causes a disease, and each of which enters the human host via a different third animal. The most commonly known example is malaria. Malaria is caused by a microscopic parasite called Plasmodium, which gets into people via the bite of a female mosquito. The other four examples are even less familiar. It was tempting to use a digital exhibit to cover this information in an engaging way but our first step was actually to delete the proposed digital exhibit here in favour of back-lit graphic panels.

Simplifying was a theme throughout, and I almost always find this on projects. When we wanted to show how public health workers often experience many set-backs during a campaign, we used the familiar format of snakes and ladders as an analogy for the experience.

In the ‘Under Attack’ game, we attempted to cover the very complicated way that the Malaria parasite attacks the human body in an arcade game. The key to making this game work was knowing where simplifying is OK and where to try to stick as true to the science as possible. We worked closely with our expert research scientists on this, sending them a series of sketches of the parasite at different life stages and explaining the reasons for simplifications we’d made.

This one really is a non-negotiable. The digital exhibits were all developed by a small local company called Pixel Stag. They produced storyboards for us from our initial briefs, which we fed back on and they developed into prototypes. Time was extremely tight for testing these with museum visitors. So instead we invited museum staff with no connection to the exhibition or topic to try the prototypes. We are looking at three things during prototyping –motivation, usability and messages. This means is the game fun? can it be made more fun?, can people use it? is it clear what to do? and finally do people get the messages we intended them to?

Although it can be tempting to focus on content, the MOST important aspect of any exhibit is how it makes people feel. Our introductory AV shows some of the parasites under the microscope. We decided not to label any of these organisms. This AV is the entire ‘why’ for the exhibition: Why should I care about this ? So we focused on creating emotional engagement. We worked with Pixel Stag and animation studio Touzie Tyke on music, images and animation to create a spooky, threatening, ambience. Extremely brief headline text gives an instant and dramatic impression of the extent of the threat.

One of the highlights of the Scottish cultural scene in 2018 was the opening of the V&ADundee. As the daughter and granddaughter of Dundonians, I felt extremely proud to haveworked on the project and privileged to work with the fantastic creative learning and community engagement team.

My involvement in the project was in the Scottish Design Galleries, where I helped the team to create the digital exhibits in ‘Design Unwrapped’ and the ‘Bridge Engineer’ hands-onexhibit.

Design Unwrapped is a table of four digital exhibits by ISO Design about the design process. There is a film about the co-designed S’up Spoon by 4c, a touchscreen about the design of the Original Hunter Wellington Boot, a film on a mirrored display case of jewellery by Scottish Designer Lynne MacLachlan, and a touchscreen about the innovative Scopas Lamp by Designer Neil Poulton and lighting company Artemide. The development of the four exhibits involved a combination of historical research and relationship building with designers and companies for the content.

The V&A team and I worked closely with the ISO Design team on narrative, script and text writing. And we all worked together to carry out user testing at three different points in the process. Due to the excellent work of the V&A Dundee team with various communities around Dundee, we wereable to get feedback from their Young People’s Collective and invaluable input from userswith a wide range of visual and hearing impairments.

The other exhibit I worked on was Bridge Engineer, the hands-on bridge building activity.The pieces for this were produced by FifeX, based just across the river in Tayport. Thisexhibit also had extensive user testing before opening. The V&A team brought in someparents and young children and a nursery class whom they had been forming relationshipswith. This gave us important feedback on the ergonomics for young children and the level ofdifficulty as well as learning messages and enjoyment.