Designing a new children’s gallery for London’s Postal Museum
Sorted! Postal Museum
Location:
London, UK
Client:
The Postal Heritage Trust
Services:
Experience Design
Project date:
2015 – 2018
The award-winning Postal Museum opened in 2018. It explores more than five centuries of the history of Britain’s ingenious postal system and its role in our lives. KCA London designed Sorted!, the themed under-8s gallery.
During the development of the Postal Museum, we were the lead designers for Sorted! We provided gallery, exhibit and graphic design services for the gallery, from concept through to installation and opening.
Inspired by the museum’s collections and stories we developed a series of playful environments and exhibits that explore the role and activities of the postal service, past and present, through roleplay and hands-on interactivity. The result was an immersive mini-town where children can play in a sorting office, weigh parcels, deliver mail, fill postal sacks, drive postal vans and use pulleys and slides to move mail. Illustrated wall panels and moveable magnetic characters and postal vehicles create a busy London cityscape and graphic backdrop for the gallery.
The audience was at the core of our thinking throughout the design process. Our aim was to create a space that reflects the realities of how children play and explore their world, and the role of parents and guardians in that process. To support this we used audience testing to refine our ideas and designs, particularly in the initial concept stages for exhibits and graphics.
We’ve since been invited back to design one of the Postal Museum’s temporary exhibitions.
But that wasn't a real museum, was it? It was too much fun!
