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Photography credit: Photos Courtesy of Tom Arban 

Tony Reich, Senior Principal in charge Emilio Genovese, Senior Designer/Project Manager Peter Lam, Senior Designer Molly Montgomery, Senior Graphic Designer Ben Mitchell, Graphic Designer Monica Santos, Technologist Manu Sharma, Technologist Rudra Chauhan, Designer and Renderer Ed Witvoet, Technologist James Nguyen, Designer and Renderer

Lead Designer

Design Company

Project Website

Client

Christine Lockett Associates - Researcher, Interpretive Planner
Cortina Productions Inc. - Media Designer, AV
Global Exhibit Technologies - Media Hardware Consultant 
Gabriel Mackinnon Lighting Design - Lighting Consultants 
Kubik Maltbie - Cost consultants 

Design Team

The Toronto Holocaust Museum provides important Holocaust education and honors survivors and those who were murdered. The objective of the Museum is to ensure the effects of the Holocaust are not lost on future generations by building understanding and empathy. The Museum offers opportunities for students and museum-goers to immerse themselves in rich and layered experiences inviting them to understand the impact of the Holocaust through individual accounts, personal artifacts, dynamic media and a thoughtful design approach. 

An outdated exhibit and the aging population of the survivor community necessitated a reimagining of the Museum to update the exhibit narrative, design and visitor experience, and to preserve the stories and testimonies of the local survivor community. 

The overall design approach incorporates a powerful film set in a newly built theater, testimony stations, exhibits rich with historical narratives, personal artifacts, augmented-reality experiences, and a memorial space set in galleries of curved sweeping walls. The design combines these elements to provide a variety of accessible entry points into the content. Juxtaposition of the digital media, display cases, powerful graphics, and deliberate lighting combine to create an engaging and layered visitor experience.

Through a series of prominently positioned interactive station, survivor testimonies provide visitors the opportunity to hear directly from 70 people about their experiences. Each survivor was interviewed with carefully curated questions which provides visitors an opportunity to listen to each survivor's response to each question. 

Visitors are also given an AR enabled tablet to begin their non-linear and self-guided journey which most captures their interest and heart through the museum. The tablet layers a personalized learning experience with access to a rich collection of videos, photos and artifacts providing much more content. Additionally, for student tours, they are asked questions on their tablet which later become prompts for group discussion in the library. As a path to creating relevant connections between historical and current events, students end their experience in the library to engage in thoughtful discussion about what they had learned and to examine answers to the questions from the tablets. The media experiences were designed and integrated through close collaboration between THM, R&P, and our media design firm, Cortina Productions to thoughtfully create a diverse and rich experience.

The new museum is a place where students and the general visitors will learn the full range of events that enabled the Holocaust, its lasting impact, and its relevance today. The audience learns not only about history but also from history. The new design creates a visitor experience which empowers the Toronto Holocaust Museum to be agents of change and to empower a new generation of voices against hate. 

Gold Winner in Integrated Graphic Design for Social Change