Bespoke Interactives – Cornwall Energy Recovery Visitors Centre

All photos have been provided by The Freelance Design Partnership.

Cornwall Council have recently launched a state of the art energy recovery centre (aptly named the Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre!), where it will provide a more cost effective and greener alternative to traditional waste management. Alongside the facility itself a visitor centre has been developed to help provide tours of the facility and provide an exciting and educational experience for visitors – teaching them all about the facility and its role in waste management. The Freelance Design Partnership were commissioned to design the visitor centre, bringing us on board to help with some aspects of the audio visual interpretation.

We subsequently developed a number of bespoke items that would help to inform and educate visitors. One of these items is a Barcode Scanner Unit (which you may have seen a video of on our social media a few months back!). The scanner allows visitors to pick up food items (represented by foam cutouts) which they then scan to activate content on the screen about how that specific food/product can be recycled. This allows visitors to see how their shopping can affect the environment and subsequently make better environmental choices.

“My Pledge To Cornwall” comprises of a computer system and light interface. Visitors are invited to make a pledge to Cornwall to help protect the local environment by typing a message into the system. Once they have completed their message they push the large glowing button which sends it ‘to the clouds”. It was this section of the interface we developed. As the button is pressed the message is sent and a light represents it travelling from the screen to the cloud, it is then displayed on a suspended sky unit through the use of LED matrix boards.

As well as having barcode scanners and light displays, we also got the chance to make an interactive quiz using 17 of our Video Clip HD8 video players and a bespoke version of their programming software. The quiz presents questions about wildlife and Cornwall’s surrounding areas. in a ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ format. When all of the questions are answered correctly, a letter is displayed on the screen – all screens combined eventually spells out the key words, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle & Recover.

Another exciting addition to the visitor centre is a bespoke grabber. The grabber’s purpose is to help educate visitors about the metal recycling process and how different metals are sorted. Visitors are invited to use the grabber to find steel amongst the pile of mini coke cans (aluminium) and mini baked bean tins (steel) below. They move the grabber down and then up, which uses a magnet installed at the bottom to pick up the steel tins and leave the aluminium behind.

The Centre creates a great interactive experience that educates visitors about modern waste management and how their actions can impact the environment both locally and on a global scale.