Wing Luke Museum - Virtual Exhibits
The Wing Luke Museum Virtual Exhibit project is a collaborative capstone project between my Interactive Media Design capstone team and staff from the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience located in China town, Seattle. The goal of the project was to provide the museum with a monetizable digital experience to promote a new way of experiencing museums during the pandemic shutdown.
Role
Project Manager
Visual Designer, User Research, Prototyping, Pitching, Interaction Design, Product Strategy,
Project Period
October 2020 - June 2021
What is the Wing Luke Museum Virtual Exhibits?
The WLM virtual exhibits is an interactive online sandbox experience that allows users to explore real artifacts from the Wing Luke Museum's collection. The idea is to use their database of preserved artifacts as interactable digital assets in a virtual room. This not only gives the users the creative freedom to create their own museum experience but also allows museums to expand their content online without the limitations of physical space.
Target Audience/ Users
-Museum membership members: Primary target audience. They're the ones who closely follow the museum & fund future projects.
-Local community members: Primary target audience. They're the main driving force that promotes knowledge about the Asian Pacific American culture.
-Tourists: Secondary target audience. They're the source of new users and revenue that supports the museum. However, they tend to be short-term visitors, meaning only a portion of the overall project will be explored.
-Teachers: Secondary target audience. Source of group tours where students can be educated about the history of artifacts not widely taught in regular history class.
What are the benefits of this project?
- Thorough digital documentation of artifacts not only makes it more accessible but also makes it easier to preserve data. (scan artifacts into 3D models, tag longer historical records, link to other relevant artifacts, etc.)
- Museums can share their hidden collection of stored artifacts. We learned from the Wing Luke Museum Staff that the vast majority of the museum's artifacts are actually stored and rarely shown to the public.
- Museums can expand their content indefinitely in an online environment. They can showcase objects that are too fragile or too big for an in-person exhibit. Additionally, it can be objects from any culture/ historical era without having to create a full exhibit that showcases a particular theme/ time period.
-It creates a place where people can share their stories (similar to Wing Luke's "Your Story, Our Story" platform for individuals to share stories about their family and themselves.)
-Potential to create virtual collaboration exhibits between partnered museums, artists, and organizations.
Prototype of the WLM Virtual Exhibits
These are prototypes of the WLM Virtual Exhibits created using Figma. The following visuals showcase the features prioritized by the team to make the experience more personal and exciting for the user. At the same time, the features are designed to allow any Museum to expand its content online. (Please click on the images/ GIFs to learn more about the content)
Trailer Video of the WLM Virtual Exhibits
This is a trailer video used to introduce the WLM Virtual Exhibits project for the Capstone Project Event. Using limited free assets and time, we tried to focus on presenting the purpose of the project through the trailer video rather than showcasing everything about the project. The demos and research findings were presented afterward to give more context on what the project is.
The Official Design Document