Meteorites Exhibition Enhancement
An addition to New York’s American Museum of Natural History. We as a group decided to propose a multimedia improvement to the rather unpopular meteorites exhibition, adding onto its interest value and attracting both younger and older audiences.
During a school trip to New York we went on a trip to the famous American Museum of Natural History, where we were tasked with finding an unpopular exhibit and figure out a way to enhance it using multimedia. We finally landed on a small installation called “Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites”. Which didn’t see much attention from guests.
After a round of observations and desk research, we listed down a few problems with the exhibition.
01
No interactive elements, only showcases and text.
02
Room itself was very small and cramped.
03
Placement around bigger and more dynamic exhibits.
While we weren’t in a position to fix the 2nd and 3rd issues, we definitely aimed to solve the 1st.
As a group we also had to figure out how to design something for a constantly-active stationary screen in order to attract attention of guests. We decided that the best course of action would be to gamify the exhibit, combining it with education to create an edutainment solution.
From these, we singled out a few things we decided to hone in on during this project.
01
Screen’s idle state, making it dynamic and eye-catching.
02
Gamification elements, and how to create an interesting experience.
03
Unique screen type and the limitations that came with it.
During a school trip to New York we went on a trip to the famous American Museum of Natural History, where we were tasked with finding an unpopular exhibit and figure out a way to enhance it using multimedia. We finally landed on a small installation called “Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites”, which didn’t see much attention from guests.
For the concept we quickly landed on the idea of simulating meteorite collisions and showing the sheer force of what would happen if they were to collide with Earth nowadays. The concept was inspired by Neal.Fun’s Asteroid Launcher.
For the design we started with inspirations, my mind immediately went to an orange-based color pallete as the exhibit itself is already kind of orange-ish. That was also reinforced by one of my favorite video games – Outer Wilds, as it’s based on space exploration and has the same color theme going.
While we deviated from the vibe of Outer Wilds, going more into a classic arcade-y style, the color theme of the space-y blackish blue contrasted with the orange stuck around throughout the rest of the project. We decided on that arcade style, as we wanted to reinforce the gamification feel.
Next came the user flow that we sketched out, we wanted a very straightforward experience that people could get into immediately, without much thought or deliberation. The sketches matched our final solution quite well.
Here you can also see the first draft of the idle screen, where the word “Meteorites” would spin around the central meteorite.
During our exploration in said idle screen, we quickly shifted to a bit of a different concept, as we didn’t have the knowledge or time to learn how to create the rotating letters.
Thus we began our font search, and after a few options, we landed on Vermin Vibes 1989. Which we felt was appropriate for the theme and vibe of our solution.
We put special effort into making the idle state still feel dynamic and fun, making sure to catch guest’s attentions; as well as very easy to get into, with only one obvious button to click in order to start the experience.
During this project I picked up many unique skills due to the unusual type of this case:
