MET Studio | The BugWorld Experience

in Interiors by editor — December 7, 2011 at 9:10 pm | 1 comment

The BugWorld Experience®, a brand new £3.8m visitor attraction that promises visitors the opportunity to get ‘up close and personal’ with the fascinating world of bugs, opens this month in a Grade-I listed building in Liverpool’s Albert Dock. The attraction has been developed from an original concept by owner RGI (Rogers Investment Group) and will be operated and managed on site by The Petersham Group.

MET Studio Design | The BugWorld Experience

The BugWorld Experience® is the newest addition to the burgeoning museum and attractions area at Albert Dock, with neighbouring attractions including Tate Liverpool, The Mersey Maritime Museum, The Beatles Experience and The International Slavery Museum. The new Museum of Liverpool is also due to open nearby in 2010.

Leading American exhibit designers and fabricators Academy Studios were approached to help design and develop the exhibition and they then invited British exhibition designers MET Studio (with whom they had worked on many previous occasions) on board.

Under the joint venture name of MASi, MET Studio and Academy Studios subsequently won the pitch to design the 13,000 sq ft visitor experience in the Summer of 2008, joining a wider creative team on the project that also included Scottish interior designers Cubit3D (responsible for the site masterplan, all building works/planning and also for the design of the retail space, circulation areas and back-of-house); branding and signage designers ThreeBrand (commissioned and directed by Cubit3D); software designers AllofUs (who created all the interactive exhibits) and film production company Centre Screen, who devised the main AV show within the attraction (with both companies working to briefs and direction from MET Studio).

“The inspiration for the attraction came from a visit by RGI’s founder Des Rogers to an insectarium in Canada”, explained Alexandra Prescott, MET Studio’s lead designer on the scheme. ‘This was followed by further research at other insectariums, including a brand new one in New Orleans, which the design team from MET Studio also flew out to see. The resulting concept for a UK attraction was one where entertainment and education are finely balanced through a variety of engaging exhibits. There is much to be learnt at BugWorld about the world of bugs, but the emphasis is definitely on having fun in what is essentially a leisure rather than a museum experience.’

The attraction features a number of simulated habitats (from a rainforest to a savannah to the everyday British home), along with digital and interactive exhibits, games, information points and continuous shows with trained handlers, giving visitors opportunities to touch and even hold bugs, ranging from giant train millipedes to Madagascan hissing cockroaches – all of which give visitors a real sense of the way in which bugs understand and negotiate the world, whilst underlining their importance in our life and in the planet’s ecological survival.

‘Visitors will start their journey by encountering the bugs found in a tropical rainforest and end up finding out about the creatures they share their home with – such as cockroaches and bedbugs’ explained Keith Thomas, Director of the Petersham Group.

The BugWorld Experience®: Walk-through

Arrival is via a dramatic double-height entrance space, dominated by a wasps’ nest and three giant wasps suspended from the ceiling, alongside a 3m-high, animatronic, giant preying mantis eating a cricket (as featured in the BugWorld logo). There are live insects on display in the entrance area also, creating an immediate sense of drama and anticipation. These include an orchid mantis, a salmon pink tarantula and a giant leaf insect.

A central ticket and sales desk (designed, as with the other elements in this area, by Cubit3D) is in an insect-inspired amoebic shape with large vertical banners above in the BugWorld livery and dynamic LED signage screens highlighting the four till positions.

Once tickets have been purchased, visitors then enter BugWorld via the AV intro show area, set within the wasps’ nest (which is made from recycled materials; this is very much an exhibit that practises what it preaches on environmentalism). There they see a 5-minute show (commissioned by and developed by MET Studio and created by film production company Centre Screen), entitled ‘The Wonder of BugWorld’. The 120° panoramic film plays to an audience of 30 people at one time and intro area also serves a functional role as a holding device to control the flow of visitors through the space.

The film, with an immersive ‘surroundtrack’, is narrated by famous Liverpool actor Craig Charles in the character of a wasp, with a humorous but educational storyline on life from a bug’s point of view, including how to blend in to different environments, eating (and being eaten!), flying and defence against predators.

From the intro area, the visitor journey then begins properly up a staircase on the first floor. The main exhibition space is arranged into six key habitats: three are global (tropical forest / savannah and desert) and three are UK environments (water / woodland and ‘your world’). Set within an interior of exposed brickwork, with recycled rubber flooring, the six habitats are scenically-depicted with imaginative use of sound to add further realism.

The Tropical Forest area comes first, entered via a rope bridge, beneath an overhead canopy. The area boasts the first live specimens of the exhibition (26 in total), with the stars of the show here two colonies of leaf-cutter ants. ‘Most of the insects came from zoos, but the attraction also has a team of in-house insect specialists’, explained Alexandra Prescott. ‘Their brief is to breed the insects on site, as there is a great emphasis here placed on the insects’ well-being and on conservation issues.’

A gateway (created from recycled board) then forms a transition into the Savannah area, dominated by life-size animal parts (the rear end of a zebra and the four legs and underbelly of a giraffe – wonderfully modelled by Academy Studios) to give visitors a sense of scale and to suggest the habitat of a Savannah area (backed up, here and throughout, by murals on floors and walls). One of the major games of the attraction, designed and developed by AllofUs, is housed here: the Dung Beetle Rally, where visitors have to roll their dung balls to the winning line.

Modelled termite mounds with hands-on interactives inside form a second transition area, this time into the Desert landscape. The area also houses the first mobile handling station, where a member of staff will bring out a variety of insects from back-of-house areas and demonstrate the insects, allowing visitors to touch them.

The UK and global habitats are separated by a mid-point area called the Contemplation Zone: a place to sit and look but also one of the highlight spaces of the scheme, already glimpsed by visitors from the Desert area. Here, the walls are completely lined with glass boxes full of butterflies and bugs. All the external faces of the space are created from opaque glass, allowing for views of silhouettes from both the Desert area before and the Water and Woodland areas beyond.

From here, visitors pass up a small ramp to a timber pontoon over ‘implied’ water (created with ripple effects and blue lighting) to the Water area, the first British habitat. There is a mobile handling station, large-scale specimen tanks filled with water and a further activity area, where visitors can look at insect life taken from the Mersey. A ramp then leads down to the Woodland area, in the form of an old English garden, complete with a modelled oak tree with pull-out panels embedded in its trunk, with modelled bugs inside. The area features a handling station with live specimens and a ‘pond-dipping’ table, where three or four visitors can interact. This is actually an interactive multi-touch surface representing a pond, where the visitor’s finger can create a pathway between twelve bugs living on the surface; upon selection of one of them a video plays in a reticule in the computerised water.

A white picket fence introduces an area called ‘Your Back Garden’, where visitors learn about bees and are shown how to encourage a full and diverse selection of insects to live in their own home gardens. A four-player game takes as its subject insects’ four different mouth parts, each of which is designed to eat a different type of food. In a real showstopping exhibit, visitors can then put their heads into a hole in the wall and be surrounded by a glass tank of cockroaches, before the exhibition moves onto its final area – Your World. Here, visitors find out which bugs live in a typical kitchen before going on to a bathroom where a live house spider will be in the sink (just like home!) and then to a living room, where a screen shows footage (created by AllofUs) on designs in everyday life, which have been inspired by insects. These range from the beetle car to beehive hairdos to wallpaper (with one wall of the space showing an insect wallpaper design by leading Glasgow designers Timorous Beasties, whilst another features butterfly wallpaper).

A third transition area takes the form of a hallway, full of maps, butterfly nets, jam jars, umbrellas, wellies and raincoats. The visitor then comes into an open plan space with lots of bug handling and observation areas and occasional views into the husbandry rooms where insects are kept and bred. There is also a special ‘Baby Bugs’ area aimed at the Under-5s. The final area (combining both ‘yuk’ and ‘wow’ factors!), is the Bug Sampling area, where visitors can eat insects that are considered delicacies all around the world, from mealworms to crickets. This area is also aimed at private leisure hire for companies looking for a really original night out (bug canapés anyone?!).

After that grand finale, the route takes visitors back downstairs via a spiral stair and into the retail space, designed by Cubit3D. ‘The key design feature in making the BugWorld Experience work within the Grand Hall Building was the design of the double stair and lift arrangement that dominates the entrance space’, explained Cubit3D Director Russell Stewart. ‘Whilst the straight stair takes visitors into the exhibition area, the spiral stair allows for wide-ranging views into the retail area, with circulation routes, including a lift, designed as compactly as possible to maximise retail space.’

The retail space is situated within the double-height entrance area, where the majority of the walls were glazed, which was potentially problematic in terms of hanging display units. Cubit3D instead designed freestanding units that occupy the window areas, with display shelving on the window side and flexible retail shelving and hanging rails on the shop side. Insect-inspired shapes and bold graphics make for an eye-catching retail area, especially important given that branded signage is limited by listed building planning constraints. Iconic insect-derived shapes are used for midfloor retail units, all of which are mobile to allow for future flexibility (and to change the shape of the space for corporate or themed events). The back wall of the space includes large-scale, themed graphic panels, supplementing the low-level translucent grass in the shop window.Keith Thomas, Director of Petersham Group, responsible for the management of The BugWorld Experience®, said: “The design team has created a unique and compelling experience in Liverpool for the client, RGI Ltd. We are already in discussions regarding rolling this concept out to other locations both in the UK and abroad in the near future.”

Location: Liverpool, UK

Architect: MET Studio

Budget: £1,702,500
Owner and Concept Developer: RGI
Operator: Petersham Group
Building control / design of retail area & back of house spaces : Cubit3D
Identity and wayfinding design: Threebrand
Exhibition Design (with the following areas of expertise): MASi
Exhibition designer: MET Studio
(design / spaceplanning / graphic design and artwork (with Nadine Ratzel) /
supervision of site works, graphic production (BAF Graphics) and software production
Exhibit developer and fabricator: Academy Studios (some initial design intent with MET Studio /
realisation of ideas into working exhibits / fabrication of works / supervision of AV hardware /
installation of all works, except hardware, graphics & signage
Software designer: AllofUs
Film producer: Centre Screen
AV Hardware: Sysco
Main Contractor: ISG
M&E Consultant: PMC
BugWorld website designer: Slightly Different
Client PR company: Mere Communications
Photography Credit: Gareth Gardner