Red Dot Design Award Winner
“The key was in using state-of-the-art technology for educational purposes, creating a remarkable attraction in a museum“
ACCIONA Producciones y Diseño is proud to announce that the immersive audiovisual installation that the company designed and produced for the Wu Kingdom Helv Relic Museum in Wuxi, China, has been awarded the prestigious Red Dot Design Award.
We spoke to the Project Manager responsible for the project, Eric Teunis, who revealed the key factors of this surprisingly spectacular interactive multimedia show using a 650 m2 inmersivescreen and interactive floor, the largest in the world to date.
What does it mean to be given the Red Dot Design Award? It recognizes a job well done. The reward for creative effort and long hard work to triumph in a complicated country.
It is without a doubt that as an exhibition resource the immersive and interactive screen is truly innovative. What do you think the jury valued most? It’s possible that the key was in using state-of-the-art technology for educational purposes, creating a remarkable attraction in a museum situated quite far from well-known big cities.
What’s the biggest challenge you encountered in this Project? As the project is so innovative, the thing that was the most complicated was perhaps getting the designers and technicians working together to achieve excellence without wasting too much money in the intent. Moreover, it was difficult to understand a complicated client whose sense of business is very different from ours.
What is the added value of APD in this Project? APD has shown, as always, that it is able to work anywhere in the world, no matter where, as much in creating historical content for a different culture from its own as in maintaining technical and organizational quality in any circumstance.
What, in your opinion, had the greatest impact on the visitors who came to see the show? The shear dimension of the show’s elements and the possibility of interacting with the scenes while at the same time learning about the museum: the relics of the Kingdom of Wu of the lost city of Helv.
It isn’t the first time that APD has worked in China. It did the Pavilion of Saudi Arabia in the Expo Shanghai 2010, for which it received up to five international awards, among them the Red Dot Design Award. What does it mean to work in a country that is culturally so different, such as China? It’s a good question and difficult to answer. The client as much as the theme of the Pavilion were very different from the proposal for Wuxi. The support from the Chinese for doing the work in the Universal Exposition was important and very positive. In the second occasion it was quite prickly. There were difficulties at the moment of signing contracts, getting content approvals, support from the client’s team or training the technical staff, as well as complications at the time of payments. In a country accustomed to exportation, the biggest challenge was to adjust to something so innovative and different from any other thing they had experienced previously. Difficult but not impossible, as we have demonstrated.
Follow the link to watch the video of the show on our Youtube channel