ICO is a small, sociable and prolific design team with a successful 12-year history. In their central London studio, ICO create brands and produce exceptional print and digital media pieces for clients from the arts, property, leisure, interior design and museum sectors.

Following on from previous successful installation and game design projects, ICO were approached to design three new permanent exhibits for the National Museum of Scotland, as part of a £47million expansion that unveiled 16 new galleries.

The brief was to encourage visitors to learn how different animals behave and show the ties that bind people of the world together.

‘Animal Sprint’ shows how animals have evolved a wide range of limbs and other body parts to enable them to run, dig and climb. The exhibit challenges you to test your own speed against a variety of animals. Take a seat, get ready on the pedals and see if you can cycle faster than a charging hippo.

Animals have also developed a wide range of senses to detect the world around them, including some that we don’t have. ‘Echolocation’ brings to life one of these senses – creating a fun interactive installation that enables visitors to fly through a forest as a bat. Along the way you get to ‘see’ the trees and locate your moth prey using echolocation. By moving the joystick you can navigate through the trees and toward your next meal.

‘Connections’ is a large multi-player tabletop game that encourages visitors to make a pair from a set of objects representing people from around the world. Up to four different users can each play their own game on a separate section of a shared interface. Make a connection and the entire table illuminates, rewarding you with a light and sound display.

The launch went extremely well; the equivalent of Edinburgh’s entire population, or 500,000 people, has passed through the doors in fewer than six weeks, a figure the museum described as “staggering”.

Well done ICO for another fantastic installation project!

ICO manage their creative studio using Traffic LIVE.

Tom Kelly-Lord