HOL Experiences

08/09/2026

A panel has a fixed size, a word count and a deadline. There is always more to say than fits.

One way to resolve that is to cut until it fits. The other is to decide what sits at which level, and get that agreed before anyone starts writing to a word count.

This clock was how we told the story of standards for SPRING Singapore, now Enterprise Singapore. Twelve numerals, each one a door. Behind the 10 o'clock door, printing documents at work, and the standard that decides why A4 is the size it is. Twelve ordinary moments, each governed by something nobody thinks about.

Opening the door takes effort, which is exactly why the people who open it read what is inside.

Angeline Tong and Siti Atikah have written up how that call gets made.

Link below.

03/09/2026

Six stations, six hiding places for a ghost, and nothing fixed to the building.

The trail runs for a few weeks, so we chose not to drill or stick anything to SCCC's walls. Every station stands on its own instead.

That left the bases. SCCC is exposed to wind, and the trail draws everyone from young children to their grandparents, so every base gets filled with water on site. Heavy enough that a child climbing on the frame will not bring it down.

We measured how far visitors naturally stand from each panel, then designed the AR to that distance. Then we scanned every panel, on different phones, to check it came through cleanly on all of them.

Finding Xiao Gui is what holds it together. A five-year-old and a grandparent are looking for the same thing, and that mattered more than adapting the content for either of them.

Little Ghost Explorer runs at SCCC until 10 Sep. Go and find Xiao Gui before he heads back to the netherworld.

02/09/2026

If you are partway through a gallery or attraction project, there is one question worth settling before anything goes to fabrication.

Which parts of this story are meant to last twenty years, and which parts are only today's way of reaching today's visitor?

Answered at masterplan stage, it costs an hour. Answered after the panels are cut, it is the difference between refreshing a gallery and rebuilding one.

https://lnkd.in/p/gdTfXWta

Libraries have held everything a museum or science centre says about its subject for a century. The internet compounded it. But what is online is information. Watch people at a display case. They lean in first. The label comes second, if at all. Whatever is happening there is not information transfe...

01/09/2026

We asked Terence Chan one question: how much personalisation does an experience actually need?

"Most of the time, not much. Teams get ambitious, they reach for AI and advanced interactions, and somewhere in that the visitor stops choosing anything. What usually works better is letting people choose their own language, their own pace, and how deep they want to go."

His piece lays out four levels. Choice, context, response, and AI-tailored pathways at the top. Most projects need the first one done properly.

The risk sits higher up. Personalise too aggressively and people stop feeling guided. They start feeling watched, or alone in a room full of strangers each having a different show.

A public experience has to hold a room together. Multiple doors into the same story, not separate buildings.

27/08/2026

Almost nobody is neutral about durian. Far fewer people know where the smell comes from.

As the fruit ripens, it switches on a family of genes that manufacture sulphur compounds. That is the smell. A visitor who leaves with nothing but that has understood what a genome does.

This is the retelling test.

An experience centre is usually judged on whether visitors leave impressed. But the outcome is decided in a room you are not in. The fund manager reporting back to an investment committee. The agency visitor defending a budget line. The procurement lead describing your differentiator to their own committee. Can they repeat one true thing about your technology, in their own words, without you there to help?

At the SGH Bicentennial Genomic Garden, we built the digital layer that visitors reach by scanning a code as they walk. What followed was not ours to arrange. SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Biodiversity Medicine published the model in Cell Genomics as a guide for others.

In 2026, CapitaLand opened a second genomic garden, The Seed @ Geneo, developed with research and guidance from the institute. We did the interpretive design there, including the Ginger Playscape, the panels and floor games that bring families onto a research campus at night and on weekends, built on the institute's research and written to hold up for the scientists who work on the campus.

Chiat Siang Lau's new piece sets out four questions to settle at your next design review. Link in the comments.

26/08/2026

"How do we make sure the space that opens is still the one we approved?"

Drift rarely starts with one big decision. It starts with a design adjustment made under time pressure, or a cost saving that seems reasonable in the moment and is never checked against what leadership signed off on. A few of those moments pass unnoticed, and months later the space is a quiet approximation of the original vision.

Three documents do the work, each with a different job. The Core Narrative records what senior leadership actually approves. The Experience Masterplan translates that into how the story is allocated across the space. The Zonal Brief turns each zone into instructions a contractor can build from.

Every project needs a Zonal Brief. Scale just makes what happens without one impossible to hide.

Singapore Oceanarium runs to 800,000 square feet, delivered across a long list of consultants and contractors, coordinating through weekly syncs that sometimes ran more than four hours at a stretch. Even with that much time in the room, intent does not travel by conversation alone. It travels by specification, zone by zone.

Ask any prospective partner how they handle all three, and in what order. That answer tells you more than a portfolio will.

Honest caveat: the documents are a reference point, not a guarantee. Someone still has to hold the build against them, on site.

Full breakdown of what each document does, in the comments.

25/08/2026

Lead with hard facts about species loss and plastic pollution, and audiences feel anxious or switch off. Lead with wonder, let affection build, and by the time the harder truths arrive, visitors already care enough to feel protective.

Same content. Different order. Completely different outcome.

Our Content Strategist Elizabeth Tay wrote about this after Singapore Oceanarium, an attraction carrying serious conservation messaging inside a story built on affection rather than alarm.

Visitors now spend three to four hours in the space. Before the redevelopment it was closer to 45 minutes.

The tool she points to is story genre. Is this experience an investigation, pulling visitors forward with curiosity? A romance, building affection before the ask? A coming-of-age story, where visitors leave changed?

Genre does not change what is true. It sets the sequence. And the sequence decides almost everything downstream: pacing, content density, where the quiet moments sit.

Worth settling before content development starts. Left open, most projects default to facts first.

Full piece in the comments.

13/08/2026

There is something quite special about a project that opens on the very first day of the festival it celebrates!

Thank you to Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre 新加坡华族文化中心 (SCCC) for the opportunity to work on Little Ghost Explorer (嘿嘿小鬼在哪里?), an immersive AR experience created especially for this year's Hungry Ghost Festival (中元节).

Our team conceptualised, designed, and built the AR game together with the SCCC team. It was hard work but also very rewarding, knowing that both teams shared a belief that a tradition this rich deserves to be experienced, not just explained.

This morning at the media preview, we had a really good time. Apart from walking the press through the AR experience, there was good food and good entertainment. Because what is 中元节 without Getai (歌台)! We had Hao Hao (浩浩) as our emcee, and he treated us to two songs that brought the vibe right into the room on day one of the festival.

For those who are curious, do pop by SCCC from today till 10 September. Beyond discovering the practices behind the festival, visitors who find Little Ghost (小鬼), our character for the AR experience, at all six locations across SCCC, can play the Gachapon and exchange it for a special Hungry Ghost Festival memorabilia.

12/08/2026

We costed the build. What will it actually cost us to run an AI-powered experience?

It is the question that gets asked about every capital project, and the one that changes completely once AI is in the room.

Build cost is easy to get. It is in the tender and priced to the dollar. Running cost sits in a different year, a different budget, and often a different department.

Four things worth asking before you sign.

The no-cap problem. Ask for the annual model and check the assumed interactions per visitor. Most assume one or two. But a visitor whose next go costs them nothing will keep going. The busiest days bring the most children and the longest dwell times. Your high case is not just your expected case with a margin on top.

The version cliff. Providers retire AI models on their own schedule. Ask who re-tests and re-tunes the experience when the underlying technology updates, and whether that sits in the contract or arrives later as a variation order.

The exit data. If the technology partner holds the prompts, the tuned model, and the content corpus, you cannot walk away without rebuilding. Ensure you own those, not just the interface.

The internal handoff. Who inside your organisation owns this number? Were they in the room when the technical approach was chosen? Architecture decisions fix most of the running cost before a contract is signed, usually by whoever holds the technical brief rather than whoever carries the operating budget. Put them in the same room before you sign.

One closing thought. This is a design question rather than a procurement one.

An interaction visitors cannot stop using is usually an interaction with no ending. Give it a conclusion worth reaching. The running cost falls because the experience got better.

Both problems have the same fix.

11/08/2026

“A lot of digital in physical space gets added without a clear reason, in the hope that it will create interest on its own.”

That's Heewon Cho on why so much digital in physical space underperforms. We put three questions to her.

Q: Our visitors won't move through the space in a fixed order. Can a digital trail still work?
A: Yes, but it has to be built for that. A trail designed around one sequence creates confusion when people meet content out of order. Each stop needs to carry meaning on its own.

Q: Why did a digital feature that worked at one venue fall flat at ours?
A: Because it never exists in isolation. Spatial flow, audience mix, dwell time and emotional state all shape how people engage, and none of it transfers neatly between venues.

Q: Do we need high-tech digital experiences to make the experience engaging?
A: No. The most effective digital experiences are rarely the most attention-grabbing ones. They work with the physical space, helping people notice and understand more, rather than competing with it for attention.

Heewon unpacks all three in "The Invisible Layer: Digital Experiences that Deepen Physical Engagement" — including how Esplanade's PIP's Trail was built to handle exactly the kind of non-linear visitor flow in Q1.



Full piece in the comments.