How Fieldwork Facility turned V&A East Storehouse into a working operating system for culture

We had a chat with Fieldwork Facility about designing the wayfinding and interpretation for a space that wants to be decoded, not dictated.

It’s hard to explain the V&A East Storehouse without sounding a bit sci-fi. It’s not quite a museum, not just a warehouse, and definitely not your typical day out in East London.

Located in the former Olympic Park broadcast centre, this new public building is a hybrid: part industrial storage facility, part immersive cultural playground, and part design experiment. At the heart of its visitor experience is a quiet design feat by Fieldwork Facility, the Hackney-based studio responsible for making sense of it all.

The studio was tasked with designing all the wayfinding and interpretation for V&A East Storehouse – a project that posed an unusual challenge. How do you guide visitors through a space that doesn’t behave like a museum at all?

For Robin Howie, founder and creative director of Fieldwork Facility, the answer was to rethink what a museum could be all together. “We landed on the concept to approach V&A East Storehouse as an operating system,” he explains.

“Treating the entire building as if it’s software opened up ways to give agency within this space and speak with a younger and more diverse audience from the outset.”

A new interface for cultural access

Storehouse is the first of two major openings from V&A East, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and shaped with extensive input from local communities and the V&A Youth Collective. The radical vision is to open up the museum’s vast stored collections to the public, not just visually but also interactively, through a groundbreaking initiative called ‘Order an Object’.

Anyone at all (no credentials required) can request to view up to five pieces from the collection of over 2.3 million objects. No glass cases and no hierarchies. It’s this ethos of access and transparency that Fieldwork Facility built into every aspect of the wayfinding and interpretation system.

“Wayfinding and interpretation become an interface to help visitors search, discover, decode and hack the experience,” says Robin. “Everyone is welcome to explore, define their own experience, make connections and have agency within a national institution.”

Onboarding, not educating

From the moment visitors step inside, the space begins to guide them softly and without assumption. Instead of the traditional wall text and directional arrows, Storehouse begins with an Onboarding Text, which is a mixed-media introduction that borrows from app design rather than academia. Alongside it, a colour-coded Welcome Directory encourages free-form exploration, inviting people to find their own path through the building.

The design language carries this theme throughout. When the onboarding panel highlights the role of conservation in green, that same green appears again at the Conservation Overlook. When it mentions access in pink, visitors may later notice that pink appears again at the Study Centre and in the ‘Order an Object’ experience. It’s a system of visual breadcrumbs designed to make sense rather than shout.

QR codes and ‘museum numbers’ accompany many of the interpretation panels, encouraging visitors to dive deeper online if they wish, but just as important as what’s included is what’s left out. “Typically, museums present themselves as having a singular voice,” says Robin. “At Storehouse, we included each individual author along with their role at the museum. We’re trying to demystify how a museum works.”

Built for change

The wayfinding isn’t just a slick user experience – it’s also a sustainability statement. In line with the V&A’s circular design goals, Fieldwork Facility approached the signage and interpretation systems with modularity, longevity and recovery in mind. Every component has been designed for disassembly and reuse.

The material palette is a bricolage of recycled paper composites, tiles, aluminium cases, and letterforms made from post-consumer plastic. Even the jewel-like lava stone roundels – while admittedly the most carbon-intensive element – are small flourishes chosen for durability and impact.

The studio also rejected single-use vinyl in favour of screenprinting and painted graphics. The result is a system that looks industrial but feels human. Something tactile, coded, and deliberately flexible.

Spiller gets a reboot

One of the more unusual design decisions involved type. The V&A’s existing brand typeface, Spiller, wasn’t fit for the modular setting Storehouse demanded.

Fieldwork Facility commissioned a custom monospace version, Spiller Mono, developed by Commercial Type. The decision wasn’t just aesthetic as monospace fonts – long used in coding environments – reinforce the “operating system” metaphor at the heart of the Storehouse concept. It’s a subtle nudge that this space is programmable, hackable, and far from traditional.

Visitors as co-authors

Beyond signage, Fieldwork Facility introduced a series of Visitor Expression Points (VEPs), which are interactive touchpoints where guests can respond to questions, leave thoughts, or simply vote with custom-designed coins. These tactile interventions provide a lighter, more playful approach to engaging with the museum’s collections and their purpose.

“The coins are a nod to the V&A East brand’s plus mark,” says Robin, “but also a little reference to internet speak – adding a ‘+1’ to something you agree with.”

One VEP near the Frank Lloyd Wright Kaufmann Office invites visitors to write or stamp their reactions, while another lets them cast a simple vote. The responses don’t vanish into the ether, either – they’re bound into volumes and added to the space’s growing archive of public opinion.

Designed with – not just for – communities

Throughout the project, Fieldwork Facility worked closely with the V&A East Youth Collective and accessibility consultants Direct Access.

“We tested a lot of our work with the Youth Collective, who was a great sounding board – they told us when things were exciting, when they made sense… and when they felt a bit Black Mirror,” says Robin.

Alongside more than 60 site visits and 30 stakeholder interviews, the team also collaborated with sustainability specialists Urge Collective to assess carbon impact at key stages. The result is a system that balances design ambition with material realism – clever without being overengineered.

Back-of-house meets the public

Storehouse’s most unusual feature is its dual nature: it serves as both a public destination and a working storage facility. That means forklift trucks, climate-controlled zones, and objects constantly in motion.

Fieldwork Facility’s wayfinding had to account for this, crafting a bespoke Health & Safety code system and signage for areas typically off-limits to visitors. Even the paddles used in the Order an Object experience double up as safety markers, ensuring staff know when visitors are present in shared spaces.

A museum with version control

One of the more practical challenges the team encountered was the fluidity of the space itself. Rather than creating static placards, the studio developed editable label templates using Adobe Forms, allowing staff to update object information without waiting months for approval or print runs. It’s a low-tech but brilliantly agile solution.

Interpretation panels are mounted using a modular system designed by Fieldwork Facility in collaboration with IDK and Solved Workshop that clips onto crates, pallets, and the adaptable racking systems used to store the collection. Again, flexibility isn’t just a feature. It’s the foundation.

Looking forward

V&A East Storehouse opened its doors to the public on 31 May 2025, and the early response has been enthusiastic. Over 1,000 objects have already been ordered through the new system, and among the most-requested? A pink silk Balenciaga evening dress from 1954 – proof, if any were needed, that curiosity doesn’t need a curatorial brief.

As a design project, Storehouse might just be a quiet revolution since it’s less about spectacle and more about systems that work for people.

“We’re trying to create a space that people can make their own,” says Robin. “Something that’s open, intuitive, and genuinely accessible.”

In other words, it is a cultural OS that doesn’t crash.