Bearing Witness
The Imperial War Museum's new permanent Holocaust Galleries, designed to engage visitors through thoughtful, evidence-led storytelling.
The Challenge
Designing media about the Holocaust comes with a responsibility unlike any other project I've worked on.
My challenge wasn't simply to communicate history, but to create experiences that could engage visitors emotionally without ever overwhelming, sensationalising or distracting from the historical evidence.
Working alongside the Imperial War Museum's curators and exhibition designers Casson Mann, I helped shape the creative direction for more than 30 exhibits across the permanent galleries. Every piece of media needed to earn its place, supporting original artefacts and testimony while making an immense and often unimaginable history feel personal, understandable and relevant to audiences today.
Creative Approach
I explored contemporary ways of communicating difficult stories while ensuring every creative decision remained rooted in the historical period. Rather than applying modern visual styles, I developed design techniques inspired by the artefacts themselves, from the imperfections of ageing typewriters to layered tracing paper textures that suggested fragmented memory and incomplete historical records.
Alongside this, I drew on fundamental cinematic principles such as composition and mise-en-scène to guide attention through complex imagery. The aim was never to distract from the evidence, but to help visitors look deeper into it, revealing the human stories within while creating a coherent visual language across the exhibition.
Impact
The Holocaust Galleries opened in 2021 to widespread critical acclaim, receiving:
Museums + Heritage Permanent Exhibition of the Year
Design Week Best Exhibition Design
MUSE Design Gold Award,
National Geographic Traveller Readers' Award for Most Impactful Exhibition Space.
Most importantly, the exhibition established a new benchmark for communicating complex history through thoughtful, evidence-led design, helping educate and inspire a new generation of visitors. .
