The bone hunters recreate the paleontological process for children as a play-based learning experience with tangible interactions to foster discovery and build association with museum exhibits.
Role
Experience design
Prototyping
Visual design
Animation
team
Sam Ho
Mia Jeong
Nikita Valluri
timeline
5 Weeks
Fall 2024
tools
Figma
After Effect
Unity
Laser cut
challenge
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History houses millions of specimens, yet current exhibits often fail to convey the ongoing scientific work behind the scenes. For young children, the lack of immersive and interactive elements at the Bone Hunters Quarry limits their ability to engage deeply.
outcome
1. Onboarding: The journey begins with an narrative - a short story that orients visitors on what is going on, and what they need to do.
2. Bone hunting: Visitors will be guided to the dig site to find dinosaur bones.
3. Bone identification: After finding bones, visitors can explore them at the interactive table, where they can examine fossils with skin layers, learn about the animal's diet, and study its skeletal structure.
4. Bone preparation: After learning about their fossils, we will guide them to the other part of the table to learn how paleontologist prepare bones for research. We ask them to wrap them in a burlap, write down their name, and return the bone to the museum in a box.
5. Bone matching: At the end, kids receive a dinosaur puzzle with a missing middle piece, encouraging them to visit the real dinosaur exhibition. There, they can find the missing piece at the actual fossil display. Matching the piece completes the puzzle, triggering a dinosaur sound and revealing a fun fact about their discovery.
Context
Research
Based on their survey of visitor demographic in 2024, most of them are here with family and want to have fun and learn at the museum. We decided to look closer on how family spend time at the museum.
In our initial exploration, we examined all exhibits and found that those featuring tactile interactions attracted families the most. Then we chose to focus on the Bone Hunter's Quarry—one of the museum's most popular attractions. This large sand pit lets children dig for fossils while learning about paleontologists' work.
However, after speaking to some staff and families, we realized that while the exhibit is fun, there is little to no learning happening for kids here.
It’s hard for kids to focus on learning at the museum since they’re surrounded by so many stimulants. It’s a good opportunity for us to rethink and reimagine ”learning” at the museum.
In our in-depth talk with Dr. Matt Lamanna, the Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology, we found out about the following pain points:
Risk of damaging fossils
Potential threat to damage current fossils in proximity
Inaccuracies in spatial design
Two animals from different time period shouldn’t be right next to each other
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Limited focus on the complete excavation process
There's a lot more than excavation in paleontology
Synthesis
Through reimagining the space and scenario-based storytelling, we can recreate the steps of paleontological experience and build a more immersive play-based learning experience for kids.
We were considering technology that is appropriate for kids. We analyzed following technology and realized tangible interaction is the most kid friendly.
By identifying opportunity areas and analyzing potential technology implementation, we are able to come up with 3 design principles:
Design
Throughout their journey, 3 of these are our core interaction touch points, bone hunting, identification, and matching
Key interactions
We reimagine the new site on the current Paleo lab. opportunity for active engagement with the space:
Onboarding: the journey begins with an narrative - a short story that orients visitors on what is going on, and what they need to do.
Bone hunting: The current bone hunting experience is very rich and already enables collaboration among kids. We wanted to lean into that aspect, and augment the current experience through removable fossils to give kids a sense of discovery and accomplishment.
Bone identification: The station can be used as a standalone interaction as well. Kids don’t need to do bone hunting in order to use bone identification. We designed it this way to stay in accordance with “play” being exploratory and child-led.
Bone preparation: We wanted to get kids to understand that fossils are extremely fragile and need to be handled with care and so, we created a bone prep station where they learn about “fossil jacketing” a way to preserve fossils through step by step videos.
Bone matching: After returning the bone, the kids received a souvenir wooden piece with a missing part in the middle, encouraging them to go to find the fossils in the museum to match with the bone they discovered. Therefore reinforcing the learning experience.
demo
I used OptiTrack and Unity to build out the prototype for the table. We also used a pico projector to simulate how our immersive sand pit will look like.
Most participants find our table to be intuitive and fun. They can interact with the table without too much guidance. It might be helpful to have proper audio description to explain what each animation means.
