Culinary mini-games for The American Museum of National History
Alina Constantin + Samina
Class: Designing for Museums: AMNH - 2020
Instructor: Matt Parker
From a call to action by the client to bring it’s permanent exhibits to life, we devised a set of interactive moments to elevate the cultural heritage on display.
Players follow digital footsteps on a designed path between the cultural halls, discovering animated cooking scenes and guessing games, and collecting a card set of modern day recipes, inspired by items on location. This digital enhancement of a visitor’s walk through the museum connects the diversity of the exhibits under a global theme, and carries their experience out into the world.
The goal was to give visitors a glimpse into the timelessness of the world’s food traditions while integrating our proposal into the pre-existing visitor mobile app of the American Museum of National History, it’s interface, interactions and style guide. This involved planning the user experience; icon design, content selection and validation, interactive design, to non-linear player progression and accomplishment feedback. Examples below highlight a mini-game on Haudenosaunee corn cake making, and a multiple choice visual quiz around a Micronesian coconut scraper stool.
A public presentation of the development and prototype delivered to the museum can be seen here.
