11/03 — 2025

by ibby

When design meets storytelling, the result can be something close to alchemy and few places celebrate that magic better than the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. This year, the landmark attraction celebrates its 25th anniversary with a reimagined Yeast Room, an immersive new experience designed byDalziel & Pow in collaboration with Pixel Artworks. Part of the Storehouse’s acclaimed Ingredients Experience, the Yeast Room transforms one of Guinness’s most essential, yet invisible, ingredients into an environment that feels alive, mysterious, and quietly scientific.

An Ingredient Reimagined

Guinness yeast is legendary, a direct descendant of the strain first stored in the Guinness Yeast Library in 1903, known for giving the stout its signature depth and flavor. The new Yeast Room celebrates this hidden hero through a mix of digital art, sensory storytelling, and spatial design.

Visitors are introduced to the space through a corridor of glowing screens that share stories of the scientists and brewers who care for the yeast and reveal that, to this day, it’s stored in liquid nitrogen at the St. James’s Gate brewery.

Inside, the experience becomes truly immersive. Four synchronized projectors create a circular focal point representing a petri dish, a living, moving digital organism that responds to the presence of visitors. As guests walk through the projection, sensors translate their movement into rippling patterns of motion, allowing them to “move” budding yeast cells with a gesture.

Above, mirrored ceilings extend the illusion, while digital fog, ambient lighting, and subtle sound and scent cues envelop the senses. It’s science through the lens of storytelling — equal parts educational and enchanting.

Design as Discovery

For Sarah Fairhurst, Design Director at Dalziel & Pow, the challenge was to make the unseen both visible and emotional:

“With the Yeast Room, we wanted to transform an invisible but vital ingredient into a truly memorable experience. Yeast is the soul of Guinness, and our aim was to capture its mystery, science, and legacy through immersive storytelling that’s as playful as it is meaningful.”

That balance of playfulness and depth defines the space. The room is both installation and laboratory — a hands-on design experience that invites participation, reflection, and yes, the occasional selfie (thanks to the mirrored ceiling).

Technology That Breathes

Pixel Artworks, known for creating environments that blend digital craft and emotion, used Notch and TouchDesigner to build a real-time system of generative visuals.

“We wanted to create a living, breathing real-time system of yeast in liquid nitrogen; something as delicate as it is dynamic,” says Riaz Farooq, Senior Creative Director at Pixel Artworks. “Our aim was to make the science not just visible, but immersive and tangible.”

By combining multi-projector mapping with motion tracking, the installation achieves an uncanny sense of tactility, as if visitors are floating through a living culture, suspended in nitrogen and light.

A Living Tribute to Craft

For a brand so deeply tied to craft and chemistry, the Yeast Room is both an homage and a metaphor: a space where invisible processes are made visible through the language of design.

The project extends the legacy of the Guinness Storehouse as a place where history, innovation, and storytelling converge, now reimagined for a generation raised on interactivity and immersion.

Design by:Dalziel & Pow

Collaboration with:Pixel Artworks

Photography: Courtesy of Guinness Storehouse / Dalziel & Pow