Poster House Interactive Exhibitions

Poster House (New York City) is the first museum in the U.S. to be dedicated exclusively to posters, presenting a global view of the medium from its earliest appearances in the late 1800s to present-day uses.

We were tasked to create four interactive exhibits (three digital exhibits and one children’s area) as permanent fixtures of the museum, to be seamlessly integrated into its newly built architecture. In acknowledgement of the poster medium’s journey from oversized ink-on-paper communications to its many contemporary forms—digital, animated, interactive, generative—we ensured that all of our interactive components offered a good mix of tactile, physical, and screen-based experiences.

PHOTO BOOTH

This green-screen photo booth, visible from the street and embedded into an alcove at the museum’s entrance, allows visitors to place themselves in iconic posters using a custom interface, and receive the final posters via email, text message, and print.

Since the museum’s opening 5 months ago, over 6,500 images have been texted, emailed, and printed through the highly visible photo booth.

The photo booth continues to be a big draw for passersby, with an average of 15 minutes per visitor engagement.

DIGITAL POSTER WALL

This oversized 4K screen displays a curated grid of larger-than-life posters from the collection, which are randomly enlarged periodically, or whenever a visitor presses a nearby button. Located adjacent to the ticketing counter, our digital poster wall provides a good preview of what to expect in the museum.

CHILDREN’S AREA

Our children’s area is a blast from the past, featuring 1960s New York City scenes. A coloring mural wall with magnetic posters, interactive vintage payphones by a newsstand, and layering stations explaining how posters are made engages an audience of all ages.

POSTER MACHINE

These tabletop interactive kiosks allow visitors to experience the poster-creation process. To design them, we deconstructed what goes through a designer’s brain to create a choose-your-own-adventure poster-design game, each step of which explains the significance and thought process behind the basic ingredients of any poster—symbols, colors, phrases, fonts, and design styles. There are three themes—Propaganda, Film, or Advertising—for which we created over 143,000 images to represent all the possible design paths one can take.