Services: Electronic Design, Game Design, Diorama, Design, Production, Installation Location: National Army Museum, Chelsea, London We were commissioned by the National Army Museum to design and produce an interactive exhibition display for their Friend or Foe series, combining a gamified identification system with a large-format terrain diorama. The brief called for something that would hold up to years of public use while remaining engaging for a wide range of visitors. The electronic system needed to be intuitive enough for children but substantive enough for visitors who knew their military hardware. The diorama needed to be geographically specific, detailed enough to reward close inspection, and physically robust enough for a museum setting.
The National Army Museum in Chelsea is one of the UK’s leading military history institutions, with collections spanning centuries of British Army history. Its exhibitions are designed to engage visitors through physical objects, interactive elements and immersive environments rather than text panels alone. The Friend or Foe series focused on the challenge of battlefield vehicle recognition, a real and operationally critical skill that the museum wanted to make accessible and memorable for general visitors. The display needed to communicate genuine military context through the kind of hands-on engagement that keeps people at an exhibit rather than moving past it.
We designed and built a custom interactive electronic system that challenged visitors to identify heavy armoured vehicles, bringing the Friend or Foe scenario to life as a hands-on game. The system was developed in-house from the ground up. The game logic, interface design and electronic hardware were all produced by Studio Sowow to work together reliably in a public environment without requiring ongoing maintenance intervention. The challenge was making something that felt engaging rather than merely functional, and that communicated the operational stakes of the real-world scenario without oversimplifying them. Alongside the interactive system, we produced a large-format detailed diorama replicating terrain from a strategically significant Allied front in West Germany. The diorama was built to a scale and level of geographic accuracy that grounded the interactive display in its real historical context. Ground surfaces, topographic detail and vehicle positioning were all researched and reproduced accurately. Every element of the project was handled in-house, from initial concept and electronic design through to physical production and on-site installation at the museum. The result was an exhibition display that combined model making craft with custom electronics to produce something that visitors could engage with directly and return to.
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