Museums offer rich resources for children to play and learn, but play often lacks meaningful learning. Bone Hunters bridges this gap through play-based, tangible interactions that foster discovery and connect children to 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
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.
bone hunters
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.
5. Bone matching
At the end, kids receive a dinosaur puzzle missing a piece, prompting them to visit the real fossil exhibit. Finding and matching the piece triggers a dinosaur sound and a fun fact.
Research
The museum’s 2024 survey shows most visitors come with family to have fun and learn. Observing family behavior, we found tactile exhibits were most engaging, leading us to focus on the popular Bone Hunter’s Quarry, where children dig for fossils and learn about paleontology.
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
Play area is too close to the real fossils
Inaccuracies in spatial design
Animals from different time period are placed together
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Limited focus on the complete excavation process
There's a lot more than excavation in paleontology
Synthesis
By reimagining the space with scenario-based storytelling, we create an immersive, play-based paleontology experience, identifying tangible interaction as the most child-friendly approach.
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.
We reimagine the new site on the current Paleo lab. opportunity for active engagement with the space.
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.
