The brief for this project was to ‘revolutionise’ the public offering at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne by re-designing the venue’s façade and public spaces, and developing a new permanent exhibition on moving-image culture. Tony Sweeney, Director of ACMI, noted that, ‘The Screen Worlds project was more than just an exhibition – for ACMI it represented the centrepiece in the repositioning of the organisation’.
Rogers brought to bear the fruits of his research-by-design in his 2008 Little Chef project to address the ‘rebranding’ of ACMI. In addition to weekly packages of design development, a series of workshops were held in both Melbourne and Rogers’s studio, which allowed for collaborative development of 1:1 display prototypes, and the exploration of different means of experiencing them. In the production process for ‘Screen Worlds’, content development and design took place simultaneously, enabled by Rogers’s use of the same narrative methods he uses in his commercial work: an idea is expressed through drawings, and then developed through a search for appropriate references, culminating in a narrative of images and text. Through this process, Rogers developed exhibition ideas with the museum client to co-create a story about the exhibits. The challenge was to take a two-dimensional medium (film) and devise new three-dimensional ways of engaging and communicating with museum visitors, using precedents such as amusement arcades and fun fairs.
The ACMI statistics indicate the success of the design in engaging its audience: 91% rated the design of the exhibition as good/very good. The interactivity was a key strength of the exhibition, with 20% saying it was the main thing they liked and, overall, 31% saying it added to their enjoyment.
‘Screen Worlds’ was nominated in the Culture category of Condé Nast Traveller’s fourth Innovation & Design Awards in 2009.