This popular Midwest children’s museum hired Roto first to deliver a comprehensive creative master plan for new permanent exhibits, followed by three new exhibit projects contracted to Roto independently, based on the success of the previous collaborations.
Features
- Comprehensive visitor experience master plan
- Grocery, Farm and Water exhibits (phase 1)
- Town, Bank, Fire Station, Medical Center, Trains (phase 2)
- 3-Story Cuckoo Tower and Construction exhibit (phase 3)
Every Roto visitor experience master plan is highly tailored to the specific needs of the institution, including inputs of schedule, budget, community needs, and fundraising aims. LCM’s master plan was built around seven discrete exhibit renewal initiatives, each developed for subsequent phases of execution depending upon sponsorship success. Concepts were developed around a suite of colorful “storyboards.”
The first two phases enabled the turnkey design, development, fabrication and installation of numerous new exhibit priorities, all contracted to fixed budgets and schedules. A new water exhibit, grocery, farm, vet clinic and more were created specifically around local themes and community priorities.
The concept storyboard for the Construction exhibit depicted a very large clock tower—a Cuckoo clock specifically—that appeared to be under construction. Part STEM interactive and part large-motor climbing experience, the Construction exhibit represented the Museum’s new centerpiece, to be installed in the main entryway and rising up through all three floors.
As children use conveyors to carry foam bricks to the upper levels of the Cuckoo Climber, others stack the bricks into the “unfinished” walls of the climbing structure. At regular intervals eagerly anticipated by the children gathering at the tower’s base, an animated cuckoo bird appears, signaling a major recycling event: all the bricks come tumbling out of the walls and back onto the floor below.
