About

Knock Down Shipyard produces digital, interactive installations for museums, galleries, and other educational and cultural organizations.  Focusing on smaller institutions with tight budget constraints, we know how to do a whole lot with a little.  We’ve developed a process to attack the development of digital, interactive pieces with ruthless efficiency.

We’re trying to do two basic things.  First, help museums get a ton out of limited funding for custom interactive pieces, in some cases by taking a budget of any size and weaving it into maximum awesome.  Second, produce functional digital utilities that lots of institutions can use or adapt, at a very affordable cost.

Interactive Construction Worker Ryan Meech is Knock Down Shipyard’s foreman.  He got a start in the museum space with student projects while in the masters program at Centre for Digital Media, in Vancouver.  A lot of his work is on display at Vancouver Maritime Museum, but is also appearing at a growing number of institutions scattered around British Columbia.

The name Knock Down Shipyard refers to a method of steam ship construction that began in the nineteenth century.  To build ships for waterways that were not accessible from the ocean, such as inland lakes or canals with narrow locks, the major British shipyards would construct iron ships and carefully mark the pieces, before disassembling them for transport to the remote locations, where they were reassembled.  Just as shipbuilders brought modern, affordable vessels to locations that did not have facilities of their own, Knock Down Shipyard brings digital, interactive installations to museums that would not otherwise have the capacity to create them.