FIGURE IT OUT

Game Design For Cooper Hewitt Museum

How to engage an audience in the Cooper Hewitt collection in some way that is outside/beyond of the confines of the physical museum?

PROJECT BRIEF

Collaborate with Cooper Hewitt Museum
Role : UX / Visual Design and Processing Development
Team members : Martin Romero(UX Design) and Chanwook Min(Development)
March - May 2015

Through an interaction design class at ITP, we worked closely with digital & emerging media department at Cooper Hewitt Museum for 7 weeks. We designed and developed a game like “Where's Waldo,” except the Waldos were figurines from the museum’s website collection.

In this game, user can explore and discover the Figurines Collection of the Cooper Hewitt Museum through find & seek game. Each level, the user is shown an object from the Cooper Hewitt’s Figurines Collection. Users have to look for a figurine amidst a pattern of objects from the collection. The patterns become more difficult as the game progresses.

PROBLEM

We were asked to create a new experience that engages an audience with the collection in a new way, where walls and tickets are not a limitation. Cooper Hewitt encouraged us to use their API to utilize the photo assets. Especially, figurine was not popular collection since it's not relatively striking objects even though they have more than 400 objects which are richly historied. We thought creating the game around collection of figurines could be an interesting way for audience to interact more with it in a playful manner.