AY-PE, an AV, digital software and multimedia design studio for museums, heritage sites and attractions, is reflecting on a successful project from 2022. The firm was chosen to create and deliver two large-scale touch interactives for The Intelligence Factory, Bletchley Park’s biggest-ever exhibition on WWII code-breaking.
Bletchley Park, a heritage attraction in Milton Keynes, UK, was the top-secret home of a team of code-breakers during WWII. This exhibition, which opened to the public on 28 April 2022, opens up the venue’s Block A to visitors for the first time, showing how it would have looked during the war and exploring the crucial work done there between 1942 and 1945.
The aim of The Intelligence Factory is to educate visitors about the thousands of people who contributed to Bletchley Park in WWII. The team wanted to challenge modern assumptions, for example, the use of a female workforce, and to create an exhibition that was fun, memorable, visitor-accessible and innovative.
AY-PE’s interactive software for touchscreen walls and tables helps to place the visitor in the shoes of the men and women who worked at Bletchley Park during this time. The overall exhibition designer was Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA), a multidisciplinary firm specialising in the planning and design of museums, exhibits, educational environments and visitor attractions. Elbow Productions and Sysco provided the AV hardware.
In a recent visit, historian Dan Snow said: “I’m very struck by the interactives, they’re brilliant!”
Highlighting the role of women
In the first space, the Plotting Room, the day-to-day life of a Women’s Royal Navy Service Worker (known as Wrens), the firm developed two large touch-interactive experiences, with the software projected across 18m2 of capacitive touch-wall.
Working closely with experts and historians from Bletchley Park, AY-PE worked to adapt original Admiralty Hydrographic Charts into digital software, plotting courses and software algorithms to relate to key routes across the Mediterranean and Atlantic during WWII.
Guests are put in the shoes of a Wren working at Bletchley Park during that time. Their task is to receive plotting messages that are coming in and then use this information to record activity in the wartime sea. Working alongside the project team, AY-PE developed authentic messages to convey the nature of the Wrens’ work and create an engaging experience for the visitor.
The interactive involves selecting the correct label pin relating to an incoming message and then dragging that label pin to find the correct location at sea. The company’s software guides the grid to help the user and supports different access needs.
The coding also randomly prompts a shadow Officer to appear when the visitor hits a plot. This means across the six player areas (approx.1 metre each) one or two shadow Officers may be moving in and out of the screen, to talk to the Wren about their plot.
Putting the visitor in charge
The expansion of Bletchley Park between 1942 and 1945 came with a significant administrative and operational burden for the park. Every day, the park’s management would have to deal with a deluge of memos demanding or requiring modifications to everything from employee hiring and security to bathing facilities and bus routes. The challenge for AY-PE was to create an engaging, large-scale interactive table that would both explore the administrative function and support multiple users at once.
Nearly 100 memos were created in collaboration with Bletchley Park’s experts. These memos randomly flicker and attract visitors to hit the capacitive touch table, folding out into a “play area” when pressed. AY-PE’s projected software supplied clickable memo cards, options and illustrated results while adhering to a design that was consistent with the Park brand and board games of that era.
AY-PE designed the board to reflect an abstract version of the Park which is seemingly alive as the guest makes their choices, featuring WW2 vehicles, people, cyclists and more moving around the Park, and outcome animations popping up across the Board.
A collaborative approach
AY-PE designed the interactive with a complex hardware set-up so projection sequences are seamlessly triggered by specific capacitive touch foil areas, electronic sensors and PC processing. The materials and construction of these huge touch structures were built by Marcon fit-out and the AV hardware was installed by Sysco.
The design process was a highly collaborative one throughout. The AY-PE team actualised Bletchley Park and RAA’s briefs into rich AV designs, with regular consultation and feedback between all parties and key influencers, including 3D/ 2D design, interpretation consultant Emily-Scott-Dearing, linear media design, historical experts, hardware, fit-out and access.
The concepts and prototypes were user tested through Emma Pegram, an independent learning and evaluation consultant working with Bletchley Park and RAA. Pegram evaluated AY-PE’s AV designs with actual museum visitors, enabling the team to elevate its propositions to meet guests’ understanding and needs.
AY-PE then worked closely with Sysco hardware to resolve complexities and heighten user enjoyment within the unique, largescale, and capacitive touch set-ups.
Bringing interactives to life
“[AY-PE] responded to our brief with a combination of creative flair and common sense,” says Erica Munro, exhibitions manager at Bletchley Park Trust. “Their evident experience informed how users engage successfully with these interactives, with an audience-centred design approach. The graphic design fits well with both the exhibition look-and-feel, and Bletchley Park’s WW2 aesthetic, incorporating typescript, paperwork and historic archival material.
“These have been elevated by illustration and animation to bring both interactives to life and make them really visually appealing. These interactives were commissioned in order that they would attract and engage family groups, but needed to be accessible to all. AY-PE’s knowledge of the ways museum visitors use digital interactives combined well with our in-house subject knowledge and the visual and experiential intentions of the exhibition designers.
“These interactives are real dwell-points for young people and families, and a draw in particular for school groups. Evaluation has shown that visitors feel they have been ‘in the shoes’ of the staff these interactives represent and that our learning objectives have been met.”
A fascinating story
Richard Playford, creative director at AY-PE, says:
“We are a friendly and approachable design team taking the time to absorb ourselves in every client’s messaging and story. We learnt so many fascinating Bletchley Park and WWII facts and stories from the attraction’s experts – those story gems which help catapult our AV narrative and design into igniting a visitor’s interest and delight.
“We also had the opportunity at several stages to user-test our designs with Bletchley Park visitors, through the learning and evaluation consultant Emma Pegram. The feedback from this was invaluable in helping craft our interactive designs, UI and UX further and deliver digital experiences which intrigue, entertain and leave the visitor with a deeper comprehension of the Bletchley Park story.”
Simon Ackerley, MD and project director at AY-PE, adds:
“It was a very memorable project to work on and a wonderful concept to place visitors both mentally and physically, into the shoes of those who worked at the Park – representing the thousands of relatively unknown people who drove this vital, cutting-edge facility of its time.
“We’ve been told of recent evaluation for the digital interactives proving that both the learning outcomes and the ambition to make visitors feel ‘in the shoes’ of Park staff, has been achieved. This is fantastic news – a testament to the collaborative approach in bringing the exhibition together and in the power of well-thought-out digital interactive storytelling to engage and inspire audiences and visitors.”
Bletchley Park’s The Intelligence Factory was shortlisted at the Museums + Heritage Awards 2023.
AY-PE also recently delivered audio & visual designs for Crown to Couture, Kensington Palace’s biggest and most ambitious exhibition to date.
Top image courtesy of Bletchley Park Trust – photographer Andrew Lee
