Body Odyssey at The Franklin Institute

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia’s premier science and technology museum, was in need of a refresh to their health sciences wing. Its previous exhibits were showing their age and did not reflect current scientific understanding and medical advances that had happened since those exhibits had been developed. TFI reached out to MDSX Creative to help design a new series of galleries to highlight advancements in medical technology and the ongoing learnings of how the mind shapes our health. Importantly, while also keeping the base level education about the body’s systems and the beloved giant human heart walkthrough.

During the early design phase MDSX Creative reached out to Gierard Design and Technology. MDSX had a deep roster of creatives and a bevy of production partners but they needed a technologist to technically vet creative ideas, provide high level technical production design, and coordinate all of the disparate teams around technical matters.

For this project GDT collaborated with the creative team to validate and establish technical feasibility of all digitally enabled exhibits. Various approaches to certain technical challenges were explored via proof of concepts with external interactive vendors. Once approaches were solidified, GDT developed the initial block diagrams for communication with AV and lighting integrators.

With high level plans in place GDT helped sort through bids from various interactive development houses to determine the best partners for various exhibits. Through the entire project GDT worked with the AV partners to establish the exact bill of materials and cross validated the equipment and installation plan with developer requirements. Special care was taken to ensure that the ordering of purchases of equipment aligned to the tight installation and development timeline while allowing for interactive developers to have access to specialized equipment before it needed to be shipped to the museum. In addition to coordinating between interactive and AV vendors GDT also helped validate fixture designs to ensure that any special requirements for power, data, electronics, and PC placement were being considered. And of course, GDT also supported installation and standup efforts with various forms of direction and problem solving.

While GDT has always been actively involved in project development beyond simply writing software, this was our first project which was solely technical leadership. This opportunity allowed us to work on, by far, our most complex project to date comprising over 30 separate exhibits utilizing over 45 separate PCs, many more screens, and a myriad of sensing and interactive technology. We are very proud to have worked with so many talented individuals across many different partner companies.

The Franklin Institute’s Body Odyssey exhibit opened on time to wonderful reviews and will continue to educate both youth and adults in the Philadelphia area for years to come.