Childhood in War focuses on the impact of war on children and aims to help family visitors understand and discuss conflict. Exhibition content includes objects, personal testimony, AV, plus hands-on and interactive experiences, ranging from full-wall board games to a large-scale evacuee train carriage, integrated across familiar settings from children’s lives, from the home to the classroom.

Nissen Richards Studio’s approach, which makes extensive use of graphics and interactives, allows children as well as adults to access sometimes hard-hitting information in a thoughtful and considered way, whilst strongly establishing a sense of place that can be immediately understood by younger visitors. The ‘normality’ of the room-sets allows children to understand how little it takes to move from normality to conflict. The sets create points of immersion and discovery, whilst other areas prompt play through interactives.

Using a colour palette inspired by the objects on show, the exhibition mixes bold colours with tonal shifts and colour-washing, often used to suggest a shadow or the imprint of the past. The principle of colour ‘washing’ is used throughout as a means of abstracting the sets and creating a lively and dynamic visitor experience. Materials, meanwhile, range from the domestic, solid and familiar to the papery, bold and abstract.

The exhibition graphics reflect the fact that war turns the lives of children upside down through the use of shapes and typography that are a little bit ‘off’ – either asymmetrical, precarious, offset, crooked, uneven, slanted or irregular.

Three children were photographed in a variety of poses at the outset, with their silhouettes then either stencilled or screen-printed onto the room-set walls, created as a way of easing the difficulty of the subject matter for child visitors, as well as serving to underscore the difference between normal life and conflict. The child who is enjoying a normal, active, carefree life is seen playing and at peace, whilst the child affected by conflict has a filled-in and less personal silhouette and is often seen to be inactive, either turning away or looking down in a state of introspection.

Collaging is used for the exhibition’s 3D models, located in five of the room-sets. These use images from the IWM archive and serve to create a sense of place for where conflict has occurred, illustrating more directly the impact that conflict had on the lives of children. A literary trail forms a further element of the interactivity for children, with a total of six books alluded to and stamps for each book to be added when the individual book is located.