Roto's museum plans, experience designs, and exhibit installations all derive from the simple premise that play is learning, and children themselves create their own best learning outcomes.
Humans are born to learn through all the senses, and as children grow, their bespoke museums should become an entire world to explore. Physical, social, immersive, and changeable, their play and wonder should transcend content—an act of creation in the real world.
Children's museums and experiences excel when designed around everyday needs of real visitors and the passions of their communities. At their best, children's museums are family museums, promoting shared learning, discovery, and expression, extending those values well beyond the front door.
Roto’s extensive planning leadership unites comprehensive experience with signature originality, helping communities build a thoroughly custom and flexible foundation for future development. Core services cover new museums from the ground up as well as major renovations of existing institutions over a wide range of architectural, exhibit, fundraising and operational needs.
Roto excels at identifying and guiding next steps. Conceptual design pulls together community input, creates big ideas or refines your existing ones, and delivers a fully-realized, coherent, and compelling vision for funders and stakeholders. Outcomes can include visual storyboards, narrated bound books, walk-through models, and the most exciting renderings in the field.
Truly effective exhibit design for children strives not to shape or channel what visitors do, but the opposite. Great exhibits expand the possibilities for play, spark fresh ideas with each visit, and offer new avenues for exploration and expression as children grow.
Great ideas for interactive children’s play do not automatically translate into robust, reliable, and durable exhibits that justify a museum’s investment. Roto was born inside a science center exhibit department, and brings extensive structural, mechanical, electronic, and A/V skills to engineer interactive exhibits that last.
With design, engineering and fabrication professionals working together daily under one roof, Roto’s design practice naturally incorporates an extensive array of mock-ups and prototypes, on both a formal and informal basis, throughout the development cycle. A unique partnership with Dublin City Schools brings hundreds of K-12 visitors inside Roto’s facility (averaging more than one per week) to participate thoroughly in these efforts.
Roto evolved its popular design-build practice specifically to deliver original, cost-effective children’s exhibits of exceptional quality and durability. Roto has demonstrated on more than 100 past projects how a single, focused project team problem-solving together under one roof can deliver extremely effective and reliable exhibits to guaranteed budgets and deadlines.
Backed by exceptional 3D modeling and precision computer-controlled milling within its 60,000-square-foot advanced production facility, Roto’s team of experienced craftspeople, artists, cabinetmakers, metalworkers, and technicians comprise one of the most versatile custom fabricators working in the children’s museum field.
