Despite the somewhat tacky entrance sign, The Goldfish Pavilion is a quite elegant addition to the Giant Panda Adventure – forming as it does one side of the fictional mountain village into which visitors emerge after seeing the pandas and other animals.

First of all a disclosure: I worked on the interpretive concept with Hypsos Leisure Asia and I’m glad to say that the final product is very close to our original idea – finely detailed by Hanson Roberts. We wanted to present the goldfish story in three parts – Wild, Treasured and Celebrated.

In ‘Wild’, we tell the story of how natural mutations were first noticed in captive  carp.

At the heart of the attraction is the Chinese Treasure Box – a visual and environmental metaphor for the esteem in which the scholarly pursuit of breeding and admiring the wide varieties of goldfish is held.

The way in which goldfish have been viewed as objets d’art is underlined by their display alongside artefacts in curio cabinets.

The final Celebrated area looks at the significance of goldfish in Chinese cultural life – especially around festivals such as New Year.

All-in-all a very enjoyable little jewel of an exhibit.

Based in the converted century-old Lei Yue Mun Fort, this Museum complex consists of two main areas – the Redoubt and the Historical Trail.

The Redoubt, built by the British in 1887, was one of the largest fortifications of its kind in the Territory. It now forms the core display area of the Museum and the open courtyard that was at its heart has been covered by a specially designed tensile structure.

This houses the permanent exhibition  which traces the 600-year history of coastal defence in Hong Kong from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to the present-day Hong Kong Garrison of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The Historical Trail allows visitors to wander amongst the conserved underground magazines and batteries on the promontory around the Redoubt.

On a hot day this can be quite strenuous, but you will be rewarded with some great views across to Lei Yue Mun on Kowloonside.

Reviewing the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence from a purely museum design perspective it would be easy to be dismissive of the conventional display techniques …

… the tired audiovisual displays in need of an upgrade …

… the sometimes outmoded interior design …

… or the, frankly, less than convincing dioramas …

But this would be missing the point. The fact is, it works. Designed over ten years ago (by John Dangerfield?) it was opened to the public in July 2000. It stands out amongst museums in Hong Kong in combining a museum experience with an exterior heritage experience – making it ideal for kids. It is also distinguished by being one of the few places in Hong Kong where you can find out about the brave members of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps who were involved in some of the bitterest fighting during the Japanese invasion in 1941.

Like the fort itself, the concept behind the museum has stood the test of time. All-in-all a highly recommended place to visit.

Admission costs HK$10. Open 10am – 5pm daily except Thursdays.

There’s no doubt that Sun Yat-sen got about a bit. It is hard to visit a major city in East Asia that he did not at some point live in, visit or have a cup of tea in. And of course there is something of a tug of war between nations to claim him as their own.

Now, I’ve been to a few of these memorial halls and they range from austere mausoleums to more informative visitor centres. Thankfully, this one in Taipei finds itself towards the latter end of the scale.

The exhibition component is divided into two main rooms. To the East are displayed documents relating Dr Sun Yat-sen’s founding of the Republic of China and to the West are the documents related to his visiting of Taiwan. I spent most of my limited time in the West rooms.

This is an extremely conventional exhibition distinguished mainly by the elegance of the display furniture design. There is also little accommodation of overseas visitors in terms of language or interpretation.

There are some quite successful examples of incorporating display into the overall environment.

And some simple but popular forms of interaction that make me wonder why they did not try to include more of this in the gallery itself.

The mind-bogglingly big National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan is a great example of the adage that when you have a collection of great, authentic objects you can let them speak for themselves. For instance, who can argue with a jadeite cabbage?

So the exhibits here are very much conventional art gallery showcases with text-dominated graphic panels. And none the worse for that. However, I was intrigued to find that one of the most popular exhibits is the spectacular scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival (traditional Chinese: 清明上河圖; simplified Chinese: 清明上河图; pinyin: Qīngmíng Shànghé Tú).

But rather than display this in the rather traditional way that the vast majority of other exhibits are presented in the museum, they have provided some very effective digital animations at a number of key points along its length. Some are simply beautiful (flying in and around regal pavilions), whilst others are amusing (an old man gesticulates wildly at a boat passing beneath a bridge). I’d like to think that I may have had a small hand in inspiring this exhibit as when I was at MET Studio Design and coming up with ideas for the Hong Kong Wetland Park we designed an exhibit which did exactly this.

As you move the screen over hotspots on the scroll it triggers digital animations and information related to wetland themes. It is one of the favourite exhibits I have worked on.

These four galleries on the subjects of Fashion, Film, Food and Photography are a delight. Each take a very different interpretive direction but share a commonly refreshing and visually stimulating approach.

‘Fashion – Shopping for Identity’ is characterised by colourful swathes of cloth as a backdrop to exploring the shifting identities of Singaporean women from the 1950s to 1970s. You can touch the fabrics and admire the intricacies of embroidery on a Kebaya.

Walking into the ‘Film & Wayang – Scripting a New Life’ you feel like you have wandered into your new favourite cinema. Comfortable sofas allow you to enjoy some iconic early films choreographed across three screens.

Beyond this area you can explore the connections with the development of Chinese opera and cinema as popular entertainment in Singapore.

Without resorting to pastiche or unrealistic recreations of street food stalls, ‘Food – Eating on the Street’ makes exploring Singaporean food fun. Working with the colonial interior, a series of large plinths carry mixed media about some of the favourite dishes of the city state and how to make them.

In the next room, you can explore the individual ingredients and spices that make Singapore cooking so special.

You can even sniff them.

The last of the four galleries – ‘Photography – Framing the Family’ – is by far the most emotive and once again proves the power of ordinary people’s stories.

A series of portraits greet you as you enter a stately room whose windows are draped with muslin – as if the owners of a country house have left for the winter. But you need to look behind the portraits (literally) to find out more.

Here, one screen per portrait focusses on a social aspect of Singapore’s social history. For instance, there is a lovely account of the challenges of an early interracial relationship between an Australian woman and a Singaporean man.

Another screen focusses on the ‘Black and White Amahs’ and one British man’s touching recollections of the woman who looked after him when he was a boy.

In the next room, you can explore the development of photography in Singapore and how it helped record family life.

All in all, the Singapore Living Galleries in themselves make visiting the National Museum of Singapore worthwhile and rewarding … and that’s even before you get to the cafe in the bright, expansive atrium, the museum shop and the Singapore History Gallery.

The National Museum of Singapore is at 93 Stanford Rd and is open 10am – 8pm daily. Admission is S$10 for adults and S$5 for seniors, children and students.

First of all, it must be said that this gallery in the National Museum of Singapore has ambitions. It takes a bold approach in trying to present Singapore’s history from the 14th century to the modern period over 2,800 square metres with the minimum of text. In fact, I can’t remember actually standing in front of a graphic panel to read text once during the whole visit. This means that it relies heavily on its portable audio system.

This is almost like your own portable interactive terminal. It provides commentary from ordinary Singapore citizens (for instance, cleverly filling in the time it takes to make the long walk around the audiovisual drum that carries the introductory show), as well as the more authoritative voice of the museum. It allow you to make choices along the way of what to listen to, with the information broken down into chapters. It has the obvious advantages of being available in various languages and so does away with the need for extensive text on the walls in several languages. It also carries some atmospheric pieces of audio such as an American woman tourist visiting a 19th-century opium den. On the down side, it is heavy. I was carrying a camera and camera bag, and felt at times like an inquisitive pack horse. Also, it becomes a bit tedious typing in numbers to get information and in the end I gave up (and I’m supposed to be super-interested!).

The visit to the history galleries begins with a 360 degree audiovisual show housed within a large drum. Walking across a bridge you are surrounded by a kaleidoscope of images of Singapore backed by a soundtrack drawing on a fusion of modern and traditional music. I imagine the intention was to provide an impressionistic overview of Singapore but I have to say that it came across as somewhat corporate and, to me, didn’t really convey the visual richness of the place that you can experience by just walking through Little India, for instance. It could have been artistically more arresting and emotive – especially given the scale and technology employed. Also, I can’t help feel that the bridge-across-the-drum audiovisual experience is a little hackneyed.

After a brief overview of very early Singapore, the visitor is able to choose whether to follow a personal or events-based path through the gallery. This is another nice innovation and gives a sense of being able to exercise preference in the way you use the gallery. It is also good that it is easy enough to access either path if you want to switch, and it is not a problem to see the content of both strands.

At points through the exhibition loosely grouped objects provide a tableau as context for a display case or key object.

It seems obvious that from an early stage in the design that lighting was seen as almost a historical character in itself. The entire gallery is a black box space and you move from one beautifully (but dimly)-lit scene to another. You feel almost as if you have stumbled onto the set of a particularly depressing play. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any more melancholy …. the Japanese invade.

Here however, the audio guide really comes into it own and you can listen to the recollections of ordinary people caught up in the turmoil of war, such as the women trained to be soldiers by the Japanese.

As you reach more modern times, I was surprised that the unrelenting gloom did not lift. If anything, one’s surroundings become more Brutalist and you listen to Lee Kuan Yew speech announcing the separation from Malaysia in an area that feels like a building site project hut (maybe that was the point). And how many times have I visited a chronologically-organised exhibition where ideas (and, dare I say it, money) just seem to peter out. Clients and designers should make sure that at every other meeting they discuss the gallery in reverse so that the end of the visit receives as much attention and creative energy as the beginning. Or perhaps the closer we get to our own times, the less they capture our imaginations. It was with some relief that I handed in the brick-weight audio guide and emerged into the light.

The Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum of Singapore is a laudable attempt to bring something new to historical interpretation. There are some innovative approaches here but, however dark the spaces, it is hard to disguise that the displays themselves are quite conventional. Despite the attempt to avoid didacticism, I had an overall feeling of having spent an hour wandering through a 3-dimensional lecture by a depressive professor. Here, the past is not only a foreign country, but also a place where no one seemed to have had much fun.

The National Museum of Singapore is at 93 Stanford Rd and is open 10am – 8pm daily. Admission is S$10 for adults and S$5 for seniors, children and students.

I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of the newest major Premier League club visitor centre in Asia on a recent inspection in December.

Now that it’s open I intend to return soon to see how it is being received by the public, but I expect it to be extremely popular – with its mixture of club history and interactive skills games for kids. It is billed as Asia’s first interactive football experience. You can find The Manchester United Experience at The Venetian Macao.

Subtitled ‘160 years of Hong Kong-French common heritage & perspectives’, this temporary exhibition at the Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre looks primarily at the influence of French architectural style on the city’s built heritage.

Designed by Marc & Chantal Design, the exhibition is divided chronologically into three sections – 1840-90s (Arrival), 1900-45 (Expansion) and 1945-2008 (Renewal) – and is physically arranged using rectangular plinths. These carry graphics panels, architectural models and object showcases.

At high level, a rectangular tensile structure delineates the three periods below and acts as a projection surface for historic images.

The rear wall of the exhibition acts as a backdrop, with a series of graphic images and a map showing the urban spread of Hong Kong through the eras, and the concurrent expansion of French architectural influence.

At this point I must confess an interest as I edited the exhibition text based on the research done by Professor Ho of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

If I were to have one criticism of the exhibition it is that, whilst it does a good job in tracing the existence of French-influenced buildings in Hong Kong, it feels like a missed opportunity to give a sense of how the two communities interacted. In other words, it gives a good survey of French bricks and mortar in Hong Kong, but not of what is surely the real cement of that relationship – the way French and Hong Kong people worked and socialised together.

The exhibition continues until the 1st January 2009 at the Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre, Kowloon Park. Admission is free.

The issue of environmental sustainability is a thorny one. What is sustainable for you, may not be sustainable for me. A tree-hugger’s definition of sustainability is different from an urban planner’s.

Hence it is no surprise that the designer for the Sustainable Singapore exhibition gallery at the recently opened Marina Barrage is keen to define its theme. The gallery suggests that a small and highly urbanized city-state is only sustainable when there is clean air, affordable water, and quality living environment for its inhabitants over generations.

The first gallery describes the world today. The colour of the gallery pulsates between blue (the original beauty of our world), red (the world in distraught) and green (human intervention and remedies).

It is in this context that sustainability is sought. How is Singapore placed in a world like this?

The second gallery is built in the shape of the Singapore River, and tells the story of the river: a polluted commerce center to a clean water source. The story of Singapore River nicely mirrors the environmental story of Singapore: how it evolves from its early days of survival siege mentality, to its present eco-city state of mind.

The third and forth galleries feature water initiatives. ABC (active beautiful and clean), which redefines the roles of water canals in Singapore’s habitat, and the Marina Barrage, which turns most of the city area into a rain collection basin. After all, the paymaster for the gallery is Singapore’s water resource agency, PUB.

The fifth gallery is packaged like a jewel box. This is where sustainability is looked at from different angles: industrialization, waste management, housing, commerce, and nature. A little heavy on the mind, but useful no less.

What I like about the gallery is not the heavily scripted content, but the different moods throughout its journey. Sit down and contemplate under the organic tree; take a peek (or leak?) in the interactive and soundscaped toilet area; and enjoy a walk under the installation like light boxes. Overall, the Marine Barrage gallery makes a pleasurable visual journey.

FusionWorld is Singapore’s  Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) corporate visitor centre at Fusionopolis.

Since A*STAR’s research portfolios span micro-electronics, material science, chemistry, computer sciences, info-comm, data storage and manufacturing, one would expect that content materials are aplenty for designing a corporate visitor center.  But the answer was not so simple.

To showcase 100+ R&D within a targeted 15 – 30 minutes visit is improbable; to explain values of a particular fundamental research in a short time is almost unachievable; while to showcase something that is not conveniently visible, or even built is near impossible. The strategy was to focus on lifestyle payoffs (and Chris led workshops with A*STAR to devise the interpretive strategy for MET Studio’s design), and A*STAR’s strengths of being able to integrate different disciplines into solutions. Where research advances were not “showcase-able”, custom AV explanations were incorporated in the form of avatars.

A 3D face-capture, RFIDed, sign-in booth greets visitors by name. This is followed by a 4K digital, panoramic movie that you watch, up-close – like 5 m away, from the screen. FusionWorld is zoned according: home, work, medical, transportation and lounge.

In each “semi-virtual” zone, visitors find exhibits with built-in technologies. Like gesture-based menus, dialogue with AV avatars, a bed that detects tiny changes in pressure, brain-caps, biosensors, and a kitchen cabinet that tells you what to cook with what you have.

To cap the experience, visitors are treated with a ride on a motion-controlled bike and a stereoscopic video of Singapore in the future, which is then followed by a free-play on the multi-touch table, light-draw, and robotic butler in the lounge.

Even if visitors are not impressed with the technologies, the overall positive experience at FusionWorld will still speak volumes for where A*STAR, and Singapore, is heading.

FusionWorld is still a work-in-progress. The success of FusionWorld lies in its ability to continually update its content with real, cutting-edge technologies that will demonstrate A*STAR’s research strength, because today’s future, may quickly become yesterday’s fad.