007 Science
Chicago, IL
Inventing the world of James Bond.
KEY INFO
Client
Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
Scale
15,400 sqft / 1430 sqm
Partners
Angle Park Inc., Chinagraph, Morlights, Ravenswood Studio, RLMG
Concept
Science fiction is science’s most persuasive collaborator. The stories we tell about what’s possible have a way of making it so. And no franchise does more to populate the collective imagination with tomorrow’s technologies than James Bond. We set out to stage the conversation between the movies and the machinery.
“Ordinary objects take on extraordinary properties and the seemingly impossible becomes possible using science and engineering.”
Kathleen McCarthy, Director of Collections
Bond. James Bond
That intersection is exactly where the experience lives. Designing inside a fully realized fictional world meant drawing on the toolkit of great themed entertainment: world-building, character, narrative immersion.
Bond audiences know the drill: suspend disbelief, and the show comes alive. They accept the jetpack, the invisible car, the wrist-mounted grappling hook. Willingly. Because the story earns it. The question we kept returning to: how do you invite that same audience to stop suspending disbelief and start interrogating it, without losing what they fell for in the first place? That tension between immersion and understanding shaped every design decision.
The fact behind the fiction
Working closely with museum staff, EON Productions, and the Ian Fleming Foundation, we built an experience where Bond’s gadgets are barely fantasy at all. The prototype jetpack from Thunderball, deemed too dangerous for actual use, sits alongside the Gravity Industries Jet Suit that proved the dream viable. Suction-cup climbers from You Only Live Twice pair with real Gecko Gloves engineered to scale walls. Across thirteen vehicles and more than ninety original objects, imagined technologies converse directly with the researchers, institutions, and inventions that made them real.
Visitors move through the exhibit the way Bond moves through a mission: embedded in the action, reading the environment for clues. In Q’s lab, they design their own Secret Intelligence Service vehicles, test the physics of stunt sequences, and explore the materials science behind imagination-shaping gadgets. Production sketches, equations, storyboards, and footage layer the environments, showing how film sets and research labs borrow from each other.
First of its kind
007 Science: Inventing the World of James Bond is the first official exhibition to explore the real science and technology behind cinema’s longest-running franchise. Produced with EON Productions and the Ian Fleming Foundation at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, it welcomes families, superfans, and curious makers alike.
Visitors leave different from how they came in: convinced that fiction and science were co-conspirators all along.
