ROM Gallery of Modern Design
Modernism at Your Fingertips Multi-Touch Installation Design for the ROM Gallery of Modern Design
Project Snapshot
Industry
: Museums, Heritage & StorytellingServices
: UI-UX Design ·User Interface Standards ·Fully Annotated Files · Development.Challenge
: Create a multi-touch gallery experience that could reveal the relationships between modern design objects, movements and designers while remaining visually restrained within the ROM’s exhibition space.Outcome
: Two 80-inch interactive touch walls with a subtle monochrome interface, extending the gallery’s labelling system while giving visitors deeper access to object details, historical context and the timeline of modernist design.
Capping off over a decade of interactive work at the ROM, Overdrive was commissioned to design the user experience for exhibit details in the Gallery of Modern Furniture.
Taking cues from minimalist Bauhaus design and many of the pieces in the gallery, Overdrive created the interface for 2 80″ touch installation walls that seamlessly blend into the gallery surroundings. They provide both information on gallery specifics, as well as a historical-temporal overview of the modernist period stretching the decades.
The user experience was created with the goal of having the interface fade away, or merely have a subtle presence when not in use, and only become more focal when engaged. The UI was originally designed in multiple colours, but was determined to feel too contemporary and ultimately changed to a monochrome look.
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Multi-touch Interactive
The Royal Ontario Museum preserves extraordinary examples of 20th century furniture, glassware and ceramics, silver, jewellery, as well as graphic art by internationally acclaimed designers. The broad and varied collection encapsulates major movements of 20th-century decorative art and design, including Art and Crafts, the Weiner Werkstätte, the Deutscher Werkbund, French Art Deco, American Modernism, the Bauhaus, and Post-War International Style.
Based on it’s long history with the ROM and interactive initiatives, Overdrive was commissioned to design and program a large format multi-touch presentation that would not only provide deeper information on the objects themselves but more importantly illustrate the inter-relationships between objects, movements and designers.
Final User Interface
The gallery’s physical labelling was being designed by the ROM exhibit team at the same time as Overdrive was designing interactive. Ultimately it was the extension of colour and type standards used in hard labelling that informed our final design.
