Wonderlab Interactive Exhibit Makers (Group 1), The Science and Industry Museum

The Science and Industry Museum’s new Wonderlab gallery will be a vibrant, awe-inspiring spectacle at the heart of the world’s first industrial city. Dynamic, social and multisensory, it will celebrate the wonder of science and invite everyone to unleash their inner inventor.
Drawing on Manchester’s unparalleled heritage of innovation, the gallery will excite and challenge young minds to help inspire the next generation of scientists and inventors. Children and their accompanying adults will be encouraged to ‘Think and act like an inventor’, through curious, fun and memorable interactive experiences and a multifaceted, joyful and stimulating live programme. They will deepen their understanding of science phenomena, delight in tinkering and testing, develop new and existing skills and grow in confidence to question and explore.
As a core permanent gallery offer, the new space will be an integral part of the Science and Industry Museum’s vision and Masterplan. The gallery floor and purpose-built spaces for live programme will create welcoming, playful and inspiring environment, creating the perfect backdrop for visitors to imagine, investigate and reflect.
This tender invites suppliers to bid for Wonderlab’s Group 1 interactives, informally described as the “Hero exhibits”. These interactive exhibits will provide moments of joy, fun, surprise and wonder at regular intervals throughout the visitor journey. They will offer communal ‘wow’ moments, where large groups can engage and interact, while being surprised and impressed by the scale, novelty and working of the interactive.

For more information, please see the tender documents.

The Manchester Machine will be a spectacular feature where visitors will be mesmerised and go home talking about it. It will be a large scale interactive in which many visitors can interact at multiple points (think hand cranks, levers, pulleys) each creating its own immediate effect, providing instant gratification. Balls will roll, tracks will switch direction, pulleys will rotate, flaps will open and pistons will rise and fall, creating an ever-moving spectacle of engineering, inspired by Manchester’s history of innovation.

This exhibit will be visually striking and will catch visitors’ eye as they enter the gallery. The beautiful projection will grab their attention with its attractive, graphic presence.

This exhibit will be visually striking from a distance, as the racing lines sweep and curve around the historic pillars, creating a sense of movement, as well as connecting visitors to the beautiful architecture of the gallery.

Visitors explore a range of loose parts to create moving mechanisms using cogs, pulleys and levers.

Multiple visitors enter a space where air jets blow and visitors can use scarves or other objects to explore the impact and power of the air jets.