AY-PE, an AV, digital software and multimedia design studio for museums, heritage sites and attractions, is celebrating the fact that Bletchley Park’s new exhibition, The Intelligence Factory, has been nominated for this year’s Museums + Heritage Awards, in the Permanent Exhibition category.
For this project, the heritage attraction’s biggest-ever exhibition on WWII code-breaking, the firm created and delivered two large-scale touch interactives, which place the visitor in the shoes of the men and women who worked at Bletchley Park between 1942 and 1945.
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 provided the AV software, media production, and audio; whilst Sysco provided the AV hardware.
Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, UK, was the top-secret home of a team of code-breakers during WWII. This new exhibition 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 vital work that was undertaken there during the war.
Previous awards success
This is the fourth time that the AY-PE team has been involved in a project that has been nominated for this prestigious awards category in the last five years. The company also worked on the Brooklands Museum Aircraft Factory & Flight Shed exhibition in 2018, (winner), The D-Day Story in 2019 (nominee), and the Imperial War Museum (IWM) London’s Second World War Galleries (winner) in 2022.
It is also RAA’s second year in a row, after the team designed and developed the Second World War Galleries at IWM.
In addition to this, another AY-PE project, The Canterbury Journey, has been nominated for the Museums + Heritage Awards 2023, this time in the category of Restoration or Conservation Project of the Year. This was a £25m programme to conserve Canterbury Cathedral whilst enriching the visitor experience. For this project, AY-PE designed a varied range of films, edits, animations, touchscreen interactives and 3D-modelled CGI reconstructions. The designer for the new visitor experience was Event, the experience design agency.
AY-PE was also part of the team behind the 2021 M&H Restoration or Conservation Project of the Year joint winner – National Museum of the Royal Navy & Portsmouth City Council D-Day Story: LCT7074 Landing Craft. Working with designers Petrichor Associates and Fusion LX, an audiovisual and lighting integration specialist, AY-PE joined the team to deliver both AV software and hardware for the entire craft.
Last year, AY-PE announced that it had been chosen by Rangers F.C. in Glasgow, Scotland, to work on the Rangers Football Club Museum.
