How OMSI’s EXLAB is Building the Future of Hands-On Learning
Driven by innovation, OMSI asks: what else is possible? Our Creative Services team brings new possibilities to life through tangible learning experiences that engage, inform, and inspire minds of all ages. They are the magic behind the permanent interactives on the museum floor, nationwide touring exhibitions, and community partnerships that transform ambitious ideas into hands-on discovery. Today, that creative engine has a new home in OMSI’s EXLAB on Caruthers Street—just a six-minute walk from the main Water Avenue location.
In 2026, OMSI made a bold investment in the future of exhibit design and fabrication and traded its century-old space in the historic Pepco building for a bright, purpose-built shop, now known as EXLAB. This new space is a design-build studio uniting research, design, fabrication, and traveling exhibits under one collaborative roof.
“We get to create things from start to finish. It’s a unique opportunity to make things for our visitors with the people who interact with them every day.”
CIERA IVESON
EXLAB CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Built for a Changing Landscape
The timing of this innovation is crucial for OMSI and its partners across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. As significant federal funding cuts have reshaped exhibit design and museum education nationwide, OMSI reimagined this program to be more nimble, resilient, and responsive to new opportunities. From maintaining OMSI’s traveling exhibitions to commissioned custom design work, this model opens new avenues to generate revenue while creating moments of discovery for even more families.
Inside EXLAB: STEAM in Action
As one of the only museum-based design-build studios on the West Coast, the EXLAB facilitates the entire exhibit creation process. Raw materials roll in through the loading bay on one end, and interactive, hands-on exhibits roll out the other, ready to invite learners of all ages to play, question, and explore.
At the heart of it all is a team of researchers, designers, and fabricators, working side by side every single day. Walk the floor and you might hear a heavy-duty CNC router shaping custom timber while a painter adds the finishing touches to an exhibit element further down the assembly line. You will find welding stations, large-scale plotters, traveling exhibits in repair, and even classrooms that double as home base for OMSI camps in the summer and partner meetings in the fall and winter. The EXLAB is not just a workshop, but a living, breathing part of OMSI’s mission and a key engine for OMSI’s long-term sustainability through generating earned revenue. It is proof that transformative magic occurs at the intersection of science, technology, engineering, art, and math.
Mission-Aligned Projects: Regional Impact, National Reach
OMSI’s mission carries through every partnership and every step of the creative design process. We chooses projects that are human-centered, sustainably conscience, and rooted in community impact.
The reimagined Nancy Stueber Natural Sciences Hall showcases the studio’s full range, trading glass display cases for interactive experiences like augmented-reality sandboxes, tactile fossil labs, and multiplayer floor games. Each interactive element was designed to inspire every visitor to take climate action.
OMSI believes in creating exhibits by museums for museums. This philosophy is put into action in collaboration with the McKenzie River Discovery Center, where we recently developed the creative concept for their 46-acre educational park and museum site, including 5,000 square feet of of brand-new interactive exhibits. This new museum at a National Historic Site will invite visitors to explore how their presence at the river can support positive change. OMSI is also hard at work with other quintessential Pacific Northwest locations including Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, and prominent Portland-area parks.
National Spotlight
OMSI’s traveling exhibits and custom exhibitions can be found across the country from the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center to the Montshire Museum of Science in Vermont to an upcoming collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Wherever learners gather, OMSI is there to make science engaging, accessible, and endlessly fun.
Explore OMSI Creative Services
Big idea? A story you want visitors to touch, build, and remember? Explore OMSI’s portfolio or contact our Creative Services team today.
