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.