Science Museum Bloids

The Bloids were a permanent Science Museum London exhibit created by IDEO to explore future-facing technologies with a broad public audience. Each silver enclosure housed a different interactive experience, from voice-print identification to an early image-processing system that could transform a visitor's photograph by changing their apparent age or gender.

I designed and built two of the key interactives inside the Bloid casings. One was a face transformation experience that changed a visitor's apparent age and gender using software developed at the University of St Andrews, for which I devised and built a museum-friendly interface. The other was a speech recognition interactive that translated a complex technical system into something visitors could approach confidently in a public gallery setting.

A large part of the work was not just making the underlying software function, but making it legible and dependable for museum visitors. That meant thinking carefully about pacing, prompts, input flow and how to reduce hesitation so people could step straight into the experience.

What stands out in retrospect is how early these exhibits were. Voice biometrics and face-transformation systems were being presented as public, playful experiences in a museum in 2000, decades before either entered mainstream conversation. The Bloids were not just speculative; they were working proofs of concept ahead of their time.