HOL Experiences

17/06/2026

Eleven years ago, during SG50, we designed the narrative for an exhibition called SG Economic Miracle.

After it opened, someone from the client team noticed a visitor. An older man. Standing in front of one of the panels. Crying.

It turned out he had been a civil servant decades earlier, tasked with convincing villagers to leave their homes to make way for Singapore's development. It was hard work. Thankless, sometimes. On one visit, the villagers released a dog to chase him off.

He stood in that exhibition and, for the first time, saw what had become of all of it. He felt it had not been in vain.

It was not planned. It could not have been. But it was possible because the story was right.

That is what resonance looks like in a space. Not a metric. Not a specification. A person, alone, feeling that their life meant something.

That is the only brief worth writing.

16/06/2026

Before the details of a tender are written, an earlier decision quietly shapes everything that follows. How the tender call itself is structured.

One tender, or two, or three. The choice influences who can bid, how cost stays under control, and whether the original vision survives the build.

Our Chief Experience Officer, Angeline Tong, sets out the three ways to structure a call for tender, what each one is suited to, and the one that tends to serve museum, gallery and exhibition projects best.

For anyone preparing to commission a museum, gallery or major exhibition.

This article is one of six drawn from a downloadable guide HOL has put together for teams tasked with delivering a museum, gallery, or major exhibition. To request a copy, please email [email protected].

Learn how to structure a call for tender effectively with step-by-step guidance to streamline your process and attract the right bids.

15/06/2026

Dataland has captured significant institutional attention. For good reason.

The question it raises is not whether autonomous generative technology belongs in cultural and civic spaces. The question is what design framework allows it to function without fracturing the visitor experience.

What CS identifies in the post below is not a technology problem. It is a design problem.

Narrative drift, the gradual loss of visitor coherence that autonomous environments produce without structural anchors, is not a software failure. It is what happens when spatial storytelling is treated as a technology integration challenge rather than a design challenge.

The institutions navigating this well are asking a different question before any technology conversation begins.

Not what the system can generate. What the spatial narrative must protect.

That question sits at the centre of the spatial briefs we take on. Below, our Co-Founder Chiat Siang Lau (CS) details why governing the geography matters more than governing the engine.

The Smithsonian recently featured Dataland in Los Angeles, the world's first physical museum dedicated entirely to AI art. It marks a clear turning point for public destinations. We are moving past static media screens and into environments that generate their own content in real time. For an instit...

11/06/2026

Most experience projects begin with a strong concept and a shared vision. By opening day, something has often shifted quietly from what was intended.

Our Chief Experience Officer, Angeline Tong, on the three documents that protect what gets built from drifting away from what was approved, and why all three need to be in place.

This article is one of six drawn from a downloadable guide HOL has put together for teams tasked with delivering a museum, gallery, or major exhibition. To request a copy, please email [email protected].

Discover the core narrative experience masterplan zonal brief and its role in ensuring successful exhibition projects.

10/06/2026

Most experience briefs want to target everyone. Few define what reaching everyone actually means. Our co-founder CS on the thinking that makes the difference.

When you read enough museum, gallery, or precinct briefs, you start to see a pattern: "Design an experience that is attractive and relevant to vastly different audience groups." In practice, this usually means figuring out how to engage the casual weekend public, highly energetic school groups, time...

09/06/2026

The pressure to add AI to an experience rarely comes from visitors. It comes from the brief, the benchmark, the industry conversation.

What follows is familiar: AI layered over an experience that may not need it. Impressive in a demo but generates friction in a room full of real visitors.

Aloysius, HOL's Senior Experience Designer, argues the test is not what AI can do. It is whether the experience requires it.

Level up. Don't layer on.

Swipe through the carousel below and read the full piece here:
https://hol.sg/insight/level-up-leveraging-ai-in-experiences-without-adding-noise/

05/06/2026

The integration of agentic AI into visitor experiences is no longer a future scenario. It is arriving now, in galleries, visitor attractions, and innovation centres.

The instinct is to focus on what the technology can do. The harder question is what needs to be in place before it does anything.

For those responsible for the quality of a visitor experience, that question is not a technology question. It is a governance one. And it needs to be answered before the technology conversation begins.

In the post below, HOL’s Co-founder, CS, outlines what agentic AI actually does in a physical space, why the primary risk has nothing to do with the technology itself, and what institutions need to establish before they deploy it.

Dataland in Los Angeles is opening as a museum of AI art. The Museum of the Future in Dubai is integrating real-time generative systems into its visitor experience. Across the sector, the same question keeps surfacing: when does agentic AI come into the experience? Before acting on that, one thing i...

04/06/2026

A museum or gallery can be carefully researched and beautifully built, and still send most visitors home with little of what it set out to give them. What makes the difference is usually decided long before the design begins.

Our Chief Experience Officer, Angeline Tong, on what that is, and why it belongs at the very start, before any brief is written.

https://hol.sg/insight/the-core-narrative-the-strategic-foundation-that-shapes-every-decision-your-museum-gallery-or-exhibition-project-will-take/

03/06/2026

There is a particular kind of meeting that happens when a project matters to everyone in the room. It shows in how long people linger on a detail that most would have moved past.

These photos are from those meetings. Our team alongside the SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Biodiversity Medicine (BD-MED) team, in meetings, walking the grounds, running user tests, trying every interaction until it stopped feeling like an interaction and started feeling like a moment.

A hospital garden draws a specific kind of visitor. Someone between appointments. Someone accompanying a family member. Someone who wandered in looking for five minutes of calm. Every testing session started with that person in mind, not the science alone.

There was also, genuinely, a lot of laughter. Something about the combination of genomic science, plants, and a team trying to figure out if something works tends to produce that.

Last week, President Tharman visited the Genomic Garden at Singapore General Hospital.

We are glad our work found its audience. And glad we got to build it alongside people who cared as much as we did.

If you missed our earlier post on what the Genomic Garden is about, the link is in the comments. And if you find yourself at SGH, the garden is between Block 6 and SGH Museum.

02/06/2026

Novelty and value are not the same thing. The pressure to add AI to exhibitions and experiences is growing, but the question of whether it actually serves the audience rarely gets the same airtime.

This piece by our teammate Aloysius examines what happens when that pressure goes unchallenged, and what it costs. The argument is not against AI. It is against AI added before the right question gets asked.

One principle stands out. The best AI integrations behave like invisible engines. The audience never feels like they are operating a system. They simply feel the experience responding to them. When that standard is not met, the technology becomes friction, and friction in a public space is expensive.

The design intelligence is not in the feature. It is in knowing when the feature is necessary.

Read the full blog here:

The pressure to add AI rarely comes from visitors. It comes from the meeting room, the brief, the benchmark. AI signals relevance, innovation, future-readiness. When everyone is talking about it and doing it, opting out feels like falling behind. But the wrong use of AI does not make an experience f...