This is a new venture, which neatly pulls together all my skills in web design, audio, video and cabinet making. It's aimed mainly at museums, historic houses and other public buildings who need to present information in a captivating and entertaining format. The idea is to combine text, graphics, audio and video clips into an interactive presentation controlled by the user via a touch screen or a custom-designed control interface. All the computer gubbins are then hidden inside an attractive case, the design of which is relevant to the subject. The whole system is made as bomb-proof as possible, because it's going to be used by kids, who are ready-made destruction testing rigs.

Example projects :

In 2007, most of the museums in the land organised exhibitions to mark the anniversary of the abolition of slavery. A group of museums and funding bodies in the Midlands realised that there was a danger of no-one doing anything else, and decided to create something different. They went back 30 years to 1977, which held many memorable events such as the Queen's silver jubilee, the death of Elvis Presley, the opening of the first Star Wars film, and the launch of the Space Shuttle.

A large bus was fitted out with a travelling 1977 exhibition, containing a host of historical information, artifacts and memorabilia. My job was to produce an animated video compilation of more artifacts that wouldn't fit (such as Spacehoppers), 1970s designs, and news headlines. I also created a mockup of a 1970s television to house the display screen.

The exhibition has proved phenomenally popular with all ages, from schoolchildren to senior citizens. It is in constant demand by schools, museums and community groups.

Credits: Worcestershire Museums Service, Warwickshire Museums Service, Renaissance West Midlands, West Midlands Museums, Libraries and Archives

Enquiries : 01299 250416

BMAG has acquired a painting (left) of a lady in a posh dress, playing a virginal. These paintings were all the rage in 17th century Holland among parents with marriageable daughters. Maybe they were some sort of dowry advert. Vermeer painted a number of them. Anyway, BMAG wanted a display, aimed mainly at children, to demonstrate the inner workings of a virginal, with some music playing so that children could hear what a virginal sounds like.

After much thought and discussion, we expanded the project. We imported a virginal from Mytholmroyd and a player from London, borrowed Aston Hall for a day, dressed our long-suffering player in a dress similar to the one in the painting, and created a number of video clips of the virginal being played in an appropriate acoustic.

The finished system is housed in a virginal case, reproduced at about 3/5 scale from plans of an original in Edinburgh. The only major departure from the prototype is the video screen mounted in the lid. This would have been considered too distracting in the 17th century. The keyboard has groups of keys joined together, to produce seven large keys. Six of these keys trigger video clips of different pieces of music, and the seventh triggers a video of the internal workings of a virginal. When idle, it plays a rolling video of Aston Hall.

The system has proved very popular, especially with children. It's used by the education department as part of their study days. Children view the painting, play with the virginal, and try on a selection of 17th century garments.

Galton Valley commissioned me to create an ambitious video system, providing information on the canals of Sandwell. It covers all the surviving canals, those that have been lost, various significant buildings, and a section on canal history. It involved lots of travelling round the country with a video camera and digging into dusty archives for photographs of long-lost edifices. It's now finished, running, and published on DVD-ROM.

(Click the image for a larger version)

The system is controlled from a touch screen. It's housed in a case whose design is based on the cupboards on canal boats, decorated to match the canal art in the rest of the museum.

(Click the image for a larger version)

The main screen graphics are also designed around elements of canal art. There is an animated canal horse pulling a barge across the top of the screen. To get the motion right, I went back to Eadweard Muybridge's horse photographs of 1887.