Squint/Opera, the creative studio, has shared its insights from a recent project for Le Musée national de la Marine, Paris.
The firm collaborated with exhibition designer Casson Mann to develop new galleries and exhibitions for the museum ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The new displays seek to contextualise France’s marine history and explore the maritime world with a broader perspective.
Squint/Opera’s approach was to embark on a complete digital transformation of the attraction, creating 19 unique digital installations which make the maritime world accessible and understandable to the museum’s diverse audiences.
Authenticity & accessibility
For more than a century, Le Musée national de la Marine has served as a tribute to France’s maritime history, with a permanent collection which dates from the time of Louis XV of France.
The museum has always focused on French naval history, but it sought to broaden its scope to include trade and commerce, maritime ecosystems, and social history. In this renovation project, the museum wanted to develop a more inclusive and modern space, where exhibits are accessible to a wider audience while retaining historical authenticity.
To achieve these goals, technology has been used as a storytelling tool, with the potential to enhance visitors’ depth of understanding, whatever their age, and to improve accessibility. The exhibits include 19 digital installations, with each one exploring a different aspect of marine history and life.
In order to create exhibits that are accessible to all visitors, regardless of their abilities or barriers, Squint/Opera collaborated with Casson Mann to provide immersive audio descriptions, tactile touch points, and sign languages, along with digital information.
Vadim Charles, project director Squint/Opera, explains: “The essence of true accessibility is to ensure that as many visitors as possible feel the same richness of experience regardless of their abilities.”
To this end, Squint/Opera and Casson Mann developed exhibits with abridged versions of the content to make them understandable for young individuals or those with cognitive limitations, sign language interpretations ensure that those who are deaf or hard of hearing can participate, and displays are tactile and understandable for the visually impaired.
As a result, visitors can interact to learn about sustainable fish consumption, discover the importance of the ship’s bell, and understand sophisticated tools like the sextant.
Creating complex sensory impressions
Accessible design addresses the holistic nature of human perception in ways that surpass a standard AV installation. By engaging all senses, they provide all visitors with a richer immersive experience, while offering educational content suitable for a wide range of learning styles.
The team ran workshops and focus groups with individuals with a variety of disabilities to test the approach. The direct feedback enabled the team to refine the immersive audio, tactile touchpoints, and digital content to ensure they meet visitor requirements.
Charles comments: “True accessibility is more than just making content available; it’s about ensuring that the collection’s narrative, depth, and essence are communicated effectively in a multisensory manner. We aim to ensure that as many visitors as possible feel the same richness of experience regardless of their abilities.”
The team were mindful of the inherent challenges of accessible design, such as how to make artefacts such as a sextant, which is a visual tool, accessible to those with visual impairments. In order to overcome the challenges of such a translation, the team used a range of technologies to engage the other senses and create a complex sensory impression of what an exhibit means.
For example, when describing a sextant, the exhibit will share an understanding of the maritime instrument using audio storytelling and tactile encounters to enable visitors to feel their way through the tool’s use, while encountering a spatial description of its role on a ship at sea on the accompanying audio.
“History belongs to everyone”
Another goal of the redevelopment was to provide a broader understanding of the marine world, going beyond its militaristic foundations. The museum portrays the sea as a complex entity by including tales of trade, commerce, ecosystems, and fishermen’s lives.
The team worked closely with the museum’s in-house team, to ensure the historical and scientific accuracy of each piece of digital content.
In addition, Squint/Opera created a digital style guide that serves as a basis for the museum’s redesign and captures the essence of the establishment’s aesthetic.
This includes a suite of typefaces, visuals, and symbols, as well as navigation standards, to ensure a uniform and seamless user experience across the museum experience, from the Musée national de la Marine website to all 19 digital installations in the display.
The project, the firm says, is “a reaffirmation of a profound truth: History belongs to everyone.” With the creative approach of Squint/Opera and Casson Mann, the museum has become a location where anybody, regardless of ability, may journey through and deeply comprehend the French maritime world.
Squint/Opera recently reflected on a project with London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM). Working in collaboration with the exhibition curator, James Bulgin, a team of experts from the IWM, and the exhibition designer, Casson Mann, the team took a new approach to the story of the Holocaust.
