Designing India’s First Experiential Children’s Museum: Inside MuSo, Mumbai

An experiential children’s museum is one of the hardest briefs in architecture. It has to be a building, a curriculum, a playground and a workshop at once. It has to hold the attention of a four-year-old and a fourteen-year-old in the same afternoon. And it has to do something most museums never attempt: invite children to touch, break, build and remake everything they see. When we began working on the spaces of MuSo, the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai, this is the contradiction we set out to resolve.

MuSo is India’s first experiential children’s museum of its kind — a 100,000 square foot space in Kamala Mills, Lower Parel, where children aged two to seventeen don’t just observe knowledge, they produce it. This article walks through the design thinking behind an experiential museum, and why “conscious making” sits at the heart of every decision.

What is an experiential children’s museum?

A conventional museum is organised around the object. You walk, you look, you read a label, you move on. An experiential children’s museum inverts that relationship. Here the child is the active agent and the exhibit is the raw material. Learning happens through doing — through hands on a tool, feet on a climbing structure, an idea tested and failed and tested again.

That shift changes everything about the architecture. Sightlines have to work at a child’s height. Surfaces have to survive a decade of enthusiastic use. Acoustics have to absorb the productive chaos of a hundred children mid-experiment. And the plan has to let a space transform from a quiet reading nook in the morning into a robotics lab by afternoon. Designing for play is not designing for decoration — it is designing for resilience, flexibility and wonder simultaneously.

Designing for many ages at once

The single biggest challenge in experiential museum design is the age range. A toddler and a teenager have almost nothing in common physically or cognitively, yet both need to feel the space was built for them. Our approach was to break MuSo into distinct, themed environments — each calibrated to a mode of learning rather than a single age band.

The result is a family of MuSo environments that each carry their own spatial logic, material language and pace. Some spaces slow a child down. Others speed them up. Together they create a journey that rewards repeat visits, because no child experiences the whole museum in one day.

The labs: learning by making

The heart of MuSo is its labs, and each one answers a different question about how children learn.

• The Make Lab is a true workshop — electronics, woodworking and fabrication tools that let children build real objects, from boats to robots.
• The Play Lab treats play as serious cognitive work, with interactive structures that teach physics and spatial reasoning through the body.
• The Discover Lab immerses children in real-world challenges — marine pollution, climate, sustainability — through environments they can step inside and investigate.

Designing a working lab for children is a study in calibrated risk. Tools must be real enough to make real things, but the environment around them must be forgiving. Storage, power, ventilation, sightlines for supervision and clear circulation all have to disappear into the background so that the act of making takes centre stage.

Materials, safety and the honesty of construction

Children are the most honest critics of a building. They will find every weak joint, every sharp edge, every surface that wasn’t meant to be climbed. Experiential museum design therefore demands a material palette that is robust, non-toxic, repairable and, ideally, legible — surfaces that show how they are made, because a museum that teaches making should not hide its own construction.

We favour materials that age gracefully and can be maintained without shutting a space down. In a museum that runs at full intensity every day, maintenance is not an afterthought; it is a design parameter from the first sketch.

Why experiential design is the future of learning spaces

India is in the middle of a quiet revolution in how it thinks about children’s education — away from rote learning and towards inquiry, design thinking and STEAM. Experiential museums sit exactly at this frontier. They are not entertainment with an educational veneer; they are infrastructure for a different kind of mind.

For architects and institutions considering an experiential children’s museum, the lesson of MuSo is that the building cannot be designed separately from the pedagogy. The space is the curriculum. Get the architecture right and children will teach themselves.

Circulation as a narrative

In an experiential museum, how children move is as important as where they end up. Circulation is not just about getting from one lab to the next — it is the connective tissue of the whole experience. We design the journey so that transitions build anticipation, offer moments of pause, and give children a sense of agency over their own path. A museum that lets children choose their route teaches autonomy before they have read a single label.

Wayfinding for children also works differently from wayfinding for adults. Colour, scale, landmark moments and intuitive sightlines do far more than signage. The architecture itself has to whisper directions, drawing a child onward through curiosity rather than instruction.

Designing with children, not just for them

The most important principle in experiential museum design is humility: children are the experts on their own experience. The best decisions come from observing how children actually use a space — what they climb, what they ignore, where they linger — and letting that evidence reshape the design. A museum like MuSo is never truly finished; it learns from its visitors and evolves with them.

This is why we treat post-occupancy observation as part of the design process rather than the end of it. The space that opens on day one is a hypothesis; the children who use it are the test.

At Bricolage Bombay, we design experiential spaces, museums and learning environments that turn making into meaning. Explore our experiential work or speak with us about your next project.