IQ Smart Interactive, a young division of Spokane-based Quisenberry Marketing & Design Inc. that designs and makes interactive exhibits, shipped last week close to two dozen educational displays to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, in Santa Cruz, Calif.

The big project is the latest in what's becoming a growing revenue source for the two-decade-old advertising agency.

Located in a 5,000-square-foot workshop and office space along west Second Avenue downtown, IQ Smart Interactive was founded three years ago in an effort by the advertising agency to expand its offerings and to enter new markets, says its owner and CEO, Coleen Quisenberry.

"As a marketing firm, we already have programmers on staff who are very creative, and when you do traditional advertising, you are engaging consumers," Quisenberry says. "When you add the ability to create exhibit design, you can engage even further."

She says many of the employees who work for the marketing side of the business cross over as needed to the exhibit design division, and that all together the two ventures employ 22 people.

Quisenberry estimates the total value of the contracts for the Monterey Bay exhibit work is between $1.1 million and $1.5 million.

She says that the exhibit design arm of the company has brought in about 15 percent of the company's overall revenue each year since it was founded in 2009. She estimates that because of the higher-value projects the firm has landed this year, IQ Smart Interactive will contribute between 25 percent and 30 percent to the firm's bottom line.

"Within the next three to four years, I believe the size of the company will have doubled in volume and employees, and we'll able to do as much as we can on the other side of the business, which has taken 20 years to develop," she says. "Just because of the size of the projects and the huge need for interactive design, we are in a cutting-edge position at the right time."

Work on the design, engineering, and fabrication of the 21 interactive displays for the big Monterey Bay project began late last year, says Mark O'Brien, director of exhibit design and manufacturing for IQ Smart Interactive. O'Brien asserts that the firm's design team was able to complete what could have been more than a year's worth of work on the project in less than five months.

Late last week, the firm's team finished some last-minute details on the project before the pieces were loaded onto trucks to be transported to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, O'Brien says.

The 6,094-square-mile marine sanctuary off the coast of central California is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the new exhibit there is intended to teach visitors about the conservation and preservation of the sanctuary's native species.

The educational displays and interactive exhibits are to be located in a newly constructed, two-story building that is owned by the city of Santa Cruz, which is allowing NOAA to use the facility for the marine sanctuary exhibit, O'Brien says.

He says the displays and kiosks designed by IQ use audio, video, dimensional maps, themed displays, and interactive games and activities. In all, there will be nearly 40 high-definition screens throughout the exhibit showing images and video of the sanctuary's inhabitants and environment.

The marine sanctuary's educational center will contain an 18,000-gallon tank with oceanic plants and animals that are replicated to scale to show visitors what an underwater canyon ecosystem in Monterey Bay looks like, O'Brien says. He says IQ designed the tank, but that it's being built by a company that specializes in aquarium fabrication.

He says the tank also will feature two miniature, underwater remote-operated vehicles mounted with cameras that visitors can control. That feature is designed to give visitors a sense of what a diver would see when navigating the sanctuary's underwater environment.

He says that because NOAA doesn't support the use of captive species in its exhibits, the environment will be entirely fabricated with life-like looking animals, plants, and other components of the natural ocean environment. IQ has contracted the work to make those realistic-looking animal replicas to another company, he says.

Another area of the center will be designed to look like an underwater kelp forest, with life-size kelp plant structures that will tower over visitors. Various underwater animal models will be suspended from the ceiling to look like they're swimming through the kelp forest, he says, and visitors can learn about the different species that live in the kelp forests from the sea floor to the forest canopy. O'Brien says IQ also contributed to designing this feature of the exhibit.

IQ Smart Interactive's team of programmers and exhibit designers have created several interactive features for the center, including a game visitors can play that simulates a leatherback turtle's annual migration across the Pacific Ocean, starting at the Monterey Bay sanctuary, he says.

A touchpad on a kiosk allows visitors to guide their turtle onscreen, and along the way they must "feed" jellyfish to the turtle, a component of its natural diet, he says. Periodically, a plastic shopping bag will appear on the screen—looking very similar to the jellyfish—and players must not let their turtle ingest the bag because it would be deadly to the animal.

O'Brien says the game simulates real-life scenarios that the animals face. One of the intents of the exhibits, he says, is to educate visitors—many of whom will be children—on the effects humans can have on natural environments like that of the sanctuary.

"School-bus loads of kids will come there every day, and it's a place where educators who don't have those tools (in a classroom) can go to get kids into it, and the kids can just take over," O'Brien says.

Adds Quisenberry, "If you give a child an interactive experience, they are more apt to learn, and they get to learn something through play."

The exhibit's planned grand opening is set for July, and O'Brien says IQ's specialists will be traveling back and forth between Spokane and Santa Cruz between now and then to oversee the installation of the exhibit's interactive components.

Before coming to IQ Smart Interactive, O'Brien had been working as an architect and consultant for BIOS LLC, a Bainbridge Island, Wash., planning and design firm that specializes in exhibit planning, design, and construction.

He says BIOS had been working on NOAA's Monterey Bay project for several years before IQ Smart Interactive was established. O'Brien says BIOS is the project's overall architect and serves as its construction manager.

The interactive features being designed at IQ's workshop and studio were conceptually developed by the project's architect, but are being fully designed, engineered, and fabricated by IQ, he says.

IQ Smart Interactive has designed interactive and educational features for four other NOAA marine sanctuary centers, and Quisenberry says that former relationship helped the firm land the big Monterey Bay project contracts.

Those four other projects were for the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, located about 45 minutes south of Bellingham, Wash.; the Olympic Coast Discovery Center, in Port Angeles, Wash.; and two marine centers in Hawaii, one in the city of Hilo on the island of Hawaii and one on Maui.

O'Brien says the firm is hoping to land contracts to work on NOAA's next marine sanctuary exhibit update, which could be in Fiji or in Michigan.

He says the agency continually updates its educational centers on an eight- to 10-year cycle to stay current with research and technology.

IQ Smart Interactive also is working simultaneously on several other interactive exhibits, Quisenberry and O'Brien say.

One of those projects is to be installed at the Mobius Kids Science Center in River Park Square, and is being sponsored by Avista Corp. to teach children about electricity used in the home, including where the energy comes from, how it's produced, and electricity safety, O'Brien says.

The interactive exhibit is called Wattson's World and features Avista's educational mascot Wattson, the Energy and Safety Watchdog, he says.

Another big ongoing project is for the San Diego Zoo's orangutan exhibit, and is being designed to provide enrichment activities for the animals in an effort to encourage them to behave more like they would in the wild, Quisenberry says.

O'Brien says the intent of the project is to create a game that will get the animals to move around and up into trees in their environment. Along the way they must press buttons in sequence, and if they complete the task correctly, they receive a treat, he says.

Orangutans are intelligent and also very strong, so one of the challenges with the interactive enrichment project was to create components to be installed in the animals' area that were unbreakable, O'Brien says.

"We studied their anatomy and they have very long arms and fingers, so they have to reach up a pane of unbreakable polycarbonate to press the button," he says. "They can work their fingers that way, but they can't get the leverage to break it."

Currently, he says, zoo staff is teaching the orangutans to use the enrichment games, and eventually the system will be installed into their exhibit.