Discovcery Dock
Interactive Micro Amusement Park

The Discovery Dock is a completely new type of immersive, permanent exhibition at the Port of Hamburg. One that uses innovative technologies to take visitors from all over the world, to those areas of the port they wouldn’t normally have access to. After just 9 months of agile project development, the Discovery Dock theme park opened to the general public at the heart of Hamburg’s Hafencity – right next to the Elbphilharmonie. Developing not just a forward thinking business model, but a unique live experience.

IDEA

Together with countless partners from economics, politics and society; from scientists and environmentalists, to shipping experts; a vision for the exhibition was developed. One that uses the principles of edutainment – being both informative and entertaining – to emotionally engage visitors. For this, cutting edge interactive storytelling techniques that would create a cohesive narrative had to be used. This had to be tightly concepted, since each visitor session had a fixed time of fifty minutes. To find a storyline for the experience, extensive research on the inner workings of the port needed to be done. Developing the overarching theme “The unseen perspectives of Hamburg’s port”.

REALIZATION

Through content mapping around this thematic, a detailed storyline was then developed: one that had the ability to weave all these diverse and complex narratives together. It was quickly possible to define the different station ideas, prototyping technological solutions and working iteratively to realise the vision. Through this, the complete experience, brand, and visual identity for “Discovery Dock” was developed. The goal was to present a future vision, taking reference from the port’s industrial and container world. The scenography worked with container-like materials and structures. For the detailed conception of the experience, individual station installations that supported this creative roof and story had been chosen. Ranging from an immersive audiovisual installation, to 4K projection mapping of real-time port data on a huge 3D port model. On seven further stations, groups could deepen their knowledge of industry, nature and business thanks to mixed and virtual reality experiences, and interactive installations.

RESULT

The resulting overall experience is a new take on immersive exhibition design. Demonstrating not just the potential for new technologies to create a new world of “edutainment” storytelling. But their potential to unlock whole new future-thinking revenue streams for businesses.