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 partnered 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.

Guided by dermatologist Dr. Bav Shergill, the team trained a custom AI model to simulate the stages of UV damage — including redness, 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 model came with challenges. “AI is a powerful, but unreliable collaborator,” says Roope. The team not only had to generate a convincing visual simulation of gradual sun damage, but also ensure it responded fluidly to the shifting outdoor environment.

“We knew we couldn’t do this on real skin, ethically or practically — so we created a synthetic simulation that mirrored 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.

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