The Gardening Club and Wonderhood Studios 'Burnable Billboards' reveal risk of sun exposure in real time

Wonderhood Studios and The British Skin Foundation launched The Burnable Billboard to cut through apathy around sun safety in the UK. The live installation showed healthy skin gradually burning in real time, triggered by live UV levels, to confront two key misconceptions: that UK sun isn’t dangerous, and that darker skin tones don’t burn.

To bring the idea to life, Wonderhood collaborated with AI-creative studio The Gardening Club, led by Tomas Roope. Alongside photographer Paul Akinrinlola, they captured hyper-detailed close-ups of healthy skin — intentionally beautiful and almost sultry, to create a jarring contrast when the damage unfolded onscreen.

Under guidance from British Skin Foundation dermatologist Dr. Bav Shergill, The Gardening Club team trained a custom AI model to simulate the stages of UV damage — not just redness, but swelling, blistering and skin tone-specific responses. Accurately representing how different skin types react was a priority, and often overlooked in traditional sun care messaging.

Using AI-powered interpolation, The Gardening Club created seamless transitions between each burn stage. But this wasn’t just a pre-rendered animation: the system responded dynamically to live UV data — speeding up or slowing down based on time of day, cloud cover, and real-world exposure patterns. The full sequence depicted six hours of unprotected sun exposure, unfolding in real time.

“The production process was bookended by traditional tools — photography, development and coding — but AI was necessary to bring them together,” explain Roope and Wonderhood’s head of integrated production, Natasha Johnson. “Realising this idea simply wasn’t achievable without emerging technology.”

Training the AI model wasn’t straightforward, and Tomas calls the technology “a powerful, but unreliable collaborator.” First, he had to create a visual simulation of skin damage progressing over a six-hour period. Then, understand how to control this sequence during the live installation.

“We knew we couldn’t do this on real skin, ethically or practically,” said Roope. “So we created a synthetic simulation — blending photography, AI, and real-time weather data to mirror how skin actually responds to the sun.”

Strategically placed in high-footfall, high-UV locations like Westfield Stratford, The Burnable Billboard delivered a visceral public warning: sun damage doesn’t just happen abroad. It can happen here, to anyone. Inclusive, innovative, and impossible to ignore — this is tech-driven storytelling at its most urgent.

To read the full unabridged article click here.