an unusual year

What an Unusual year 2020 has been… Despite all the challenges we are incredibly grateful and fortunate to emerge in a strong position with some exciting new projects and more new faces joining our team.

2020 has seen us working with old friends including the teams at Historic Royal Palaces, Glasgow Science Centre, RLB 360, The Scouts Association, Imperial War Museum London and Duxford and National Museums Liverpool as well as many more new teams such as those at The British Motor Museum, STEM Learning, Southwell Minster, Museum of Making Derby, Cooper Art Gallery and Chester Zoo.

We have adapted how we work, to ensure the safety of our team and clients and have continued to deliver projects on time, to budget and to the high standards associated with an Unusual project. We have worked with our client teams to provide flexible solutions to the new challenges, zoom meetings and exhibit reviews, storing completed exhibits in the workshop until the site is open to enable safe installations, extending warranties and even undertaking live audience engagement sessions in our workshops with enhanced social distancing and safety measures.

To help our client teams re-open their museums and attractions safely we have been undertaking Covid Safety Audits of Galleries and Exhibitions. Following a site visit by one of our experienced team members, we compile a report of simple and reversible (for when Covid is a thing of the past) enhanced safety recommendations which can include measures such as swapping a touch based trigger on a audio interactive for a PIR movement sensor trigger. These small reversible tweaks help our clients re-open their doors with confidence.

The Lockdowns have also presented us with a perfect opportunity to overhaul many of the more popular attractions and galleries for whom we undertake regular maintenance contracts. These sites are normally quite tricksy to work in purely due to the high volume of visitors attending that we need to work around safely – lock down removed this challenge and presented us with empty galleries which meant we could really get to the nuts and bolts of interactives and ensure they will be able to cope with demand upon re-opening.

So, not quite the year we planned and of course, it has been a year with so much sadness and loss. We extend a huge thank you to all our clients, colleagues, suppliers and sub-contractors who have stood by us and worked through it all with us.

We extend a huge thank you to all our clients, colleagues, suppliers and sub-contractors who have stood by us and worked through it all with us.

Lets hope 2021 brings great things for our wonderful team, our hard working clients and our exciting projects.

Carol Fenner, Development Director