Melbourne Holocaust Museum
A series of seven unique interactives that give visitors a hands-on, educational understanding of the diverse experiences of Holocaust survivors.
Co-designed in close partnership with the Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM), Sandpit delivered the detailed design and production phases of a series of deeply impactful experiences for the Museum’s new gallery space. Each of the interactives centre first-hand accounts, artworks, or personal letters and diary entries from Holocaust survivors, placing their voices at the front and centre of the entire experience.
The many interactives all vary in content, technology and interactivity. They include custom built digital maps, a touchscreen where visitors can find their own initials in Hebrew, and a physical postcard embedded with NFC technology that lets visitors trace the path of a specific survivor throughout the gallery. All together, they form a user journey that moves linearly from the beginning of the Holocaust to the end, and into the modern day experience of survivors and their descendents.
Sandpit worked to develop a cohesive design language that honoured the incredibly important stories being told, and celebrated Jewish culture through the ages. The Star of David’s distinct geometry became a key motif, echoing throughout the design. MHM have always strived to be ‘a light in the dark’, and Sandpit took great inspiration from this evocative image.
Due to the enormous amount of information on offer, it was an important part of Sandpit’s role to strategise the best and most accessible ways to store, display and access content to meet the needs of a wide variety of visitors and staff. We built MHM a custom content management system that simplifies and makes accessible huge amounts of video, text and imagery. Using an open-source platform, we crafted the backend to be completely bespoke to their needs.
The exhibition is designed to give visitors the autonomy to curate their own experience and in doing so, educate themselves and others on the beauty of Jewish culture and the horrors of the Holocaust. Everything in the gallery is designed to be hands-on and uses multimedia storytelling to create experiences that are engaging, educational, memorable and emotionally moving.
