Michael Potter
Peggy Notaebart Nature Museum Sustainability Center
A redesign of the water section of their exhibit
Overview:
My senior capstone class we worked with the Peggy Notaebart Nature Museum in Lincoln Park Chicago. They are a kids museum focusing on local nature and on the second floor they have a Sustainability Center/conservation exhibit focusing on a few different areas water, electricity, food, and economy and culture. Each have these massive touch screens displaying a looping video and a massive LED globe in the middle. The class split into groups each taking on one section/screen. My group focused on the water screen/section of the exhibit. We spent the first ten weeks research and ideating. Then we spent the last ten weeks building, developing, and implementing our new designs into the exhibit.
Research:
We started our research by going to different museums around Chicago and looking at their exhibits as well as how people were interacting them. Peggy Notaebart is primarily a children's museum so when observing how people were interacting with the exhibit we were primarily focused on how the kids were interacting with them. Our group spent a lot of time at the natural history museum the Field Museum here in Chicago and the Peggy Notaebar Museum. On one of the days we went there several field trips there so we were able to tag a long and observe how the kids interacting with the exhibits as they went through the museum.
Final Research Presentation:
From our research we decided we wanted to gamify the video that was already in the exhibit. We wanted to create a simple game that would educate the kids as well as keep them entertained. Below you will find our final presentation we gave to the nature museum detailing our research and our idea for the game. We wanted to create a simple river clean up game featuring the local Chicago river and its local wildlife. This would connect and add onto the content in the video that was already looping on the screen in the exhibit
PNNM Water by Denielle Parks
Game:
After getting the approval from the staff at the nature museum we started to develop the game. We decided to build the game in Unity. We split our group into two one group who would focus on learning Unity and developing the game in it. The second group would work on creating all the original graphics we would need for the game. Below you will find different iterations of the game we had throughout the process as well as some of the original graphics and characters we created for the game.
Game Iterations
Final Game
Currently working on getting it playable on the web!