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ANTHROPOCENE EXHIBIT
ENVIRONMENTS DESIGN — FALL 2019






Project Brief

 Create a temporary (3–4 week) exhibition featuring a current event. Consider how technology can augment content, increase learning and/or make the museum experience more interactive.


Tools

Physical Prototyping SketchUp
LittleBits
Unity3D
Overview

There's a disconnect between people and the way we experience the impacts of climate change.


Living in a first-world society, the immediate effects of our actions are seemingly intangible to us. So, how might we build concrete artifacts that give people an emotional, experiential perspective of their futures?

Target Audience: Carnegie Mellon students (ages 18–28), CMU Faculty (ages 30–65), tourists/prospective students



Moodboard

With a physical and digital aspect to the space, I wanted the various interactions and experiences of the museum stay consistent for visitors. With this mind, I started by creating a moodboard with typeface and color schemes at play.








Storyboard and Prototype Iterations

Home as a place where we escape the outside world.


I wanted it to manifest in an informative way that the topic of climate change isn’t something avoidable.

Hotspots in the exhibit:
  1. Sidewall where users read the introduction
  2. Dinining room with fake, rotting food on the table where visitors can see the effects of climate change.
  3. The visitor then goes to the interactive screen-based wall about lead pipes
  4. call to action section where visitors fill out their names/email on the wall to commit to a 30-day challenge to address climate change in a small way and get check-ins from the museum via email or text.



Storyboard #1





Rough Physical Model





Unity Model to Understand How Much Space the Furniture takes up






Limitations Discovered in First Iterations

After building out the model of my first idea, I realized that the sizing wasn't quite accurate. If it were a 1:1 model, the walls and interactions would've been untouchable by the average human. Furthermore, the current interaction with the interactive wall doesn't really provide a unique experience since it's extremely screen-based. The next iteration should focus on an immersive method that shows change over time.



Parti Diagram

In order to understand the navigability of the exhibit, I created a parti diagram to understand the path I want people to take. Although it's difficult and near impossible to force people to follow certain navigation, it's still worthwhile to consider the possible paths. I wanted to pick a path that re-emphasized the coziness and feel of a home to create a sense of security that contrasts the reality of their carbon footprint.










Sensory Interactions

  1. Dining Table about CO2 (Touch)
  2. Shower with Lead Pipes in Pittsburgh (Sight)
  3. Garage with the New Car Smell of the Future (Olfactory)


Interaction One: Dining Table about CO2 (Touch)

Foods that weigh the same as the CO2 emissions they emit.


Target Audience: “I don’t understand how a plant-based diet will help the environment. I’m just going to lose out on the core nutrients and proteins.”

For instance, lamb emits 39.2kg of CO2 per kg consumed where tomatoes only emit 1.1 kg CO2 per kg consumed. These numbers would correspond with the weight of the food on the table. As the visitor tries to pick up the different options based on the menu, then they’ll find tomatoes to only be a few ounces and the lamb to be several pounds.




SketchUp Model






Interaction Two: Shower with Lead Pipes in Pittsburgh (Sight)

Map that triggers the density of lead-based sewer systems across Pittsburgh when stepped on.


Target Audience: “This is 2019. Water is safer than ever, and what’s the big deal if there’s a little lead here and there? What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

After thinking about how I could change my original interaction to something that was less touchscreen-based, I used Gravity Sketch in the Oculus to see what this interaction might be like on the floor and was based on stepping on the map itself to trigger the density of lead-based sewer systems across Pittsburgh.






This GravitySketch prototype is rather low fidelity so I decided to prototype this out in Unity with a script where each click correlated to a point on the map.















Interaction Three: Garage with the New Car Smell of the Future (Olfactory)

The “new car smell of the future” sprays a scent that correlates to how CO2 emissions from cars will affect the smell/state of our atmosphere.



Target Audience: “I can’t imagine not having my car. There’s no way our society will be dependent on public transportation. I mean, have you seen how unreliable and slow it is?”

This interaction allows the visitor to enter through this funnel-like wall to experience the “new car smell of the future” which sprays a scent that correlates to how CO2 emissions from cars will affect the smell/state of our atmosphere. It’s a highly potent scent so I decided to contain it within one cylindrical section so that the smell won’t escape to other sections of the exhibit.










Gamification of the Call-to-Action: Personalized Starter Kits

Call to action that provides people with a sense of agency.


Version #1: In my first draft, the call to action seemed just like a large ethnographic survey and it didn’t make sense in the grand scheme of things in providing people with privacy or agency.






Instead of hoping that people would voluntarily sign up for extra emails or texts, I considered better gamification of the end goal that’s exciting for those of all ages. I took my own motivators and excitement driven by when new packages come in the mail, so what if the same concept was applied here.












Final Physical Model