It is exhausting to elucidate the V&A East Storehouse with out sounding a bit sci-fi. It isn’t fairly a museum, not only a warehouse, and positively not your typical time out in East London.
Situated within the former Olympic Park broadcast centre, this new public constructing is a hybrid: half industrial storage facility, half immersive cultural playground, and half design experiment. On the coronary heart of its customer expertise is a quiet design feat by Fieldwork Facility, the Hackney-based studio accountable for making sense of all of it.
The studio was tasked with designing all of the wayfinding and interpretation for V&A East Storehouse – a mission that posed an uncommon problem. How do you information guests via an area that does not behave like a museum in any respect?
For Robin Howie, founder and inventive director of Fieldwork Facility, the reply was to rethink what a museum may very well be all collectively. “We landed on the idea to strategy V&A East Storehouse as an working system,” he explains.
“Treating your entire constructing as if it is software program opened up methods to offer company inside this area and communicate with a youthful and extra various viewers from the outset.”
Picture credit score: Hufton+Crow
Picture credit score: Hufton+Crow
A brand new interface for cultural entry
Storehouse is the primary of two main openings from V&A East, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and formed with intensive enter from native communities and the V&A Youth Collective. The unconventional imaginative and prescient is to open up the museum’s huge saved collections to the general public, not simply visually but additionally interactively, via a groundbreaking initiative referred to as ‘Order an Object’.
Anybody in any respect (no credentials required) can request to view as much as 5 items from the gathering of over 2.3 million objects. No glass instances and no hierarchies. It is this ethos of entry and transparency that Fieldwork Facility constructed into each facet of the wayfinding and interpretation system.
“Wayfinding and interpretation change into an interface to assist guests search, uncover, decode and hack the expertise,” says Robin. “Everyone seems to be welcome to discover, outline their very own expertise, make connections and have company inside a nationwide establishment.”
Onboarding, not educating
From the second guests step inside, the area begins to information them softly and with out assumption. As a substitute of the normal wall textual content and directional arrows, Storehouse begins with an Onboarding Textual content, which is a mixed-media introduction that borrows from app design fairly than academia. Alongside it, a colour-coded Welcome Listing encourages free-form exploration, inviting individuals to search out their very own path via the constructing.
The design language carries this theme all through. When the onboarding panel highlights the function of conservation in inexperienced, that very same inexperienced seems once more on the Conservation Overlook. When it mentions entry in pink, guests might later discover that pink seems once more on the Examine Centre and within the ‘Order an Object’ expertise. It is a system of visible breadcrumbs designed to make sense fairly than shout.
QR codes and ‘museum numbers’ accompany most of the interpretation panels, encouraging guests to dive deeper on-line if they want, however simply as necessary as what’s included is what’s disregarded. “Sometimes, museums current themselves as having a singular voice,” says Robin. “At Storehouse, we included every particular person creator together with their function on the museum. We’re attempting to demystify how a museum works.”
Constructed for change
The wayfinding is not only a slick consumer expertise – it is also a sustainability assertion. In step with the V&A’s round design objectives, Fieldwork Facility approached the signage and interpretation programs with modularity, longevity and restoration in thoughts. Each part has been designed for disassembly and reuse.
The fabric palette is a bricolage of recycled paper composites, tiles, aluminium instances, and letterforms comprised of post-consumer plastic. Even the jewel-like lava stone roundels – whereas admittedly essentially the most carbon-intensive ingredient – are small prospers chosen for sturdiness and affect.
The studio additionally rejected single-use vinyl in favour of screenprinting and painted graphics. The result’s a system that appears industrial however feels human. One thing tactile, coded, and intentionally versatile.
Spiller will get a reboot
One of many extra uncommon design selections concerned kind. The V&A’s current model typeface, Spiller, wasn’t match for the modular setting Storehouse demanded.
Fieldwork Facility commissioned a {custom} monospace model, Spiller Mono, developed by Industrial Sort. The choice wasn’t simply aesthetic as monospace fonts – lengthy utilized in coding environments – reinforce the “working system” metaphor on the coronary heart of the Storehouse idea. It is a delicate nudge that this area is programmable, hackable, and much from conventional.
Guests as co-authors
Past signage, Fieldwork Facility launched a collection of Customer Expression Factors (VEPs), that are interactive touchpoints the place company can reply to questions, go away ideas, or just vote with custom-designed cash. These tactile interventions present a lighter, extra playful strategy to participating with the museum’s collections and their objective.
“The cash are a nod to the V&A East model’s plus mark,” says Robin, “but additionally a little bit reference to web communicate – including a ‘+1’ to one thing you agree with.”
One VEP close to the Frank Lloyd Wright Kaufmann Workplace invitations guests to jot down or stamp their reactions, whereas one other lets them forged a easy vote. The responses do not vanish into the ether, both – they’re certain into volumes and added to the area’s rising archive of public opinion.
Designed with – not only for – communities
All through the mission, Fieldwork Facility labored carefully with the V&A East Youth Collective and accessibility consultants Direct Entry.
“We examined a whole lot of our work with the Youth Collective, who was an important sounding board – they advised us when issues have been thrilling, once they made sense… and once they felt a bit Black Mirror,” says Robin.
Alongside greater than 60 web site visits and 30 stakeholder interviews, the staff additionally collaborated with sustainability specialists Urge Collective to evaluate carbon affect at key phases. The result’s a system that balances design ambition with materials realism – intelligent with out being overengineered.
Again-of-house meets the general public
Storehouse’s most uncommon function is its twin nature: it serves as each a public vacation spot and a working storage facility. Which means forklift vehicles, climate-controlled zones, and objects continuously in movement.
Fieldwork Facility’s wayfinding needed to account for this, crafting a bespoke Well being & Security code system and signage for areas usually off-limits to guests. Even the paddles used within the Order an Object expertise double up as security markers, guaranteeing workers know when guests are current in shared areas.
A museum with model management
One of many extra sensible challenges the staff encountered was the fluidity of the area itself. Quite than creating static placards, the studio developed editable label templates utilizing Adobe Varieties, permitting workers to replace object info with out ready months for approval or print runs. It is a low-tech however brilliantly agile answer.
Interpretation panels are mounted utilizing a modular system designed by Fieldwork Facility in collaboration with IDK and Solved Workshop that clips onto crates, pallets, and the adaptable racking programs used to retailer the gathering. Once more, flexibility is not only a function. It is the muse.
Wanting ahead
V&A East Storehouse opened its doorways to the general public on 31 Might 2025, and the early response has been enthusiastic. Over 1,000 objects have already been ordered via the brand new system, and among the many most-requested? A pink silk Balenciaga night gown from 1954 – proof, if any have been wanted, that curiosity does not want a curatorial temporary.
As a design mission, Storehouse would possibly simply be a quiet revolution because it’s much less about spectacle and extra about programs that work for individuals.
“We’re attempting to create an area that folks could make their very own,” says Robin. “One thing that is open, intuitive, and genuinely accessible.”
In different phrases, it’s a cultural OS that does not crash.
