The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s objective is to engage visitors with the process of design. How can you get every visitor to instantly become a designer? By giving them some very simple tools that make them feel the magic of making.

The Welcome Wall, at Harvard’s Smith Campus Pavilion, is an innovative digital installation designed to provide a combination of historical and current narratives to the diversity of demographics that go through this interstitial space each day. These include students, faculty, staff, Cambridge residents and general visitors.
The experience utilizes machine learning to display a flowing collection of historical and current news articles, interspersed with contextual media, creating an immersive experience reminiscent of a digital aquarium.
The content continuously evolves, offering visitors a glimpse into Harvard’s rich history and current events. Visitors can interact with the wall, navigating articles and exploring topics of interest in a visually engaging format. This interactive experience blends technology and storytelling, making the Welcome Wall a fun yet functional engagement in a public social setting.

The New York At Its Core (NYAIC) exhibit at the MCNY offers immersive explorations of the city’s past, present, and future, through a variety of innovative interactive experiences. The exhibits use a variety of interactive technologies to educate and engage visitors in different facets of New York. 

Interactive touch interfaces are a standard mode to allow visitors to dig into stories. To put them into digital totems changed the mechanism of interaction, where visitors engaged with content in the space, rather than just with a screen on a wall. The use of depth cameras to navigate content created a new language for interaction. 

These technologies and interaction modalities allow visitors to engage dynamically with the city’s evolution. 

With a mission to reach beyond museum walls and make art more relevant to the lives of individuals and society at large, visionary director Erlend Høyersten embraced an unconventional strategy at the ARoS Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark. He dedicated an entire floor— called “ARoS Public”— to become a social space for a new kind of art education. Under the creative direction of TTM Founder Elvira Barriga, the team at Local Projects was invited to create three interactive installations for ARoS Public that would connect visitors in playful, insightful and personal ways to the museum’s collection and each other.

It is not simple to tell the story of all the diverse people affected by the Sept 11th events in New York. The scale of the story itself is hard to digest. This was my first foray into experience design in the museum world, at Local Projects, in New York.

This project helped me to think about all the different aspects of modern storytelling, from both visitor and staff perspectives.

We had to think through everything from the mechanism of collecting and labeling the stories, to the decisions on which technical tools and frameworks to use, to how these tools would be maintained by in-house staff over many years. The stories that we told were deeply moving, and incredibly important to the visitors, so we had to treat the content and technology decisions with great care.

On this episode of HYPERSCALE by Briar Prestidge, we are joined by Sundar Raman, the Director of Technology at Museum of the Future. Sundar shares his insights on how, in the future, we will figure out how to create a kinder world and the tools we need to get there. With his expertise in technology, we explore the role of AI in shaping our future and how tools such as ChatGPT can be leveraged to increase productivity.

I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the 2022 Quuppa Location Innovation conference. The talk presents an overview of the experiences at the Museum of the Future, and how one could tell the story of "the future" which everyone has a different perspective on. I tried hard to bring the emotional aspect of the museum to this talk, rather than focus only on the technical implementation. So each topic in the presentation is headlined "The future is ...". I also wanted to bring the feeling of being in the museum to the audience. To do this I brought the scent of the museum to the room. The Museum of the Future's custom scent is called "Orchestra of the Future". I piped it into the room a couple of hours before the event, and had a diffuser running the whole time. Sammy Loitto, CEO of Quuppa, gave the talk right before me, and said to me during the lunch break that he felt like he had been transported to the middle east when he was giving his talk! I guess the scent had the effect I was going for!

The American Museum of Natural History building is daunting to navigate, and contains a world of riches. It is almost impossible to navigate the whole space without a lot of prior research, or a personal guide. This is where the AMNH Explorer app comes in. It was designed as a personal blue-dot guide through the museum’s physical exhibition areas, but also as a tool to learn more about specific exhibits using an augmented reality (AR) feature in the app. The Explorer provides both turn-by-turn navigation for location contextual information, and an Augmented Reality experience to gamify the identification of multiple artifacts in the space.

What does the Director of Technology do at an Experience Design firm or at a Museum? I often found myself saying things like "I'm not the IT guy", and "technology and engineering are  just different forms of creativity". 

The technical systems behind exhibition and experience design are diverse.

They include custom hardware engineering, technologies related to building and facilities management, environmental sensors, audiovisual systems, custom software development, instrumentation and monitoring, network engineering, digital- and cyber-security, and even enterprise IT. I’m sure there are even more!

To build awe-inspiring experiences, we need to leverage many different modes of technologies. To create solutions using all these diverse tools, and still keep them maintainable, through a rapidly evolving technology landscape requires careful integration and long-term planning.

It’s a generalist role, which also requires deep knowledge on multiple fronts. I certainly can’t claim to be an expert at any technical domain, but I have been forced to learn enough to execute and maintain systems that I now feel a bit less like an imposter with every new technical project.

Now I’m calling myself an “Experience Engineer”. Because it’s about bringing engineering discipline, and technical proficiency, together to solve for the user experience. 

I’m still not sure this is the right term for what we do, but it’s certainly not “the IT guy”!

At the 2022 ECSITE conference, I presented the design principles of the Museum of the Future's exhibitions, with Britta Nagel of Atelier Brueckner. We spoke about the design and implementation process of the exhibits at the museum.

On this episode of HYPERSCALE by Briar Prestidge, we filmed live from GITEX where Briar is joined on the panel with Sundar Raman, Director of Technology at Museum of the Future, and moderated by Ramit Harisinghani, General Manager at Chalhoub Group. During the panel they discuss creativity and opportunity in the Metaverse, how this may look in the future and how we as humans are to some extent already cyborgs. If you are fascinated by the concept of the metaverse and have spent countless hours scrolling the internet and it still doesn’t make sense, tune in. On Hyperscale by Briar Prestidge, leading experts discuss the future of the metaverse, crypto, NFTs, virtual reality, holograms, and augmented reality.. Because eventually every company will become a Web3 company.

ICOFOM (ICOM International Committee for Museology) hosted their 2024 sessions in Qatar, with the theme "The Future of Museums and Museology Practices in a Changing World" (program here). The full schedule of talks is here.

The full talk can be watched / downloaded as a movie from here.

I started this talk with the intention of detailing the steps that go into managing complex interactive experiences effectively. The title was originally "Managing Complex Technology-based Experiences in Narrative Driven Museums".

The talk focused on just the organizational structure that I have found to be effective when faced with complex projects.

The talk's title evolved to "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Experience Design".

I think I may do a series of sessions on this larger topic, since I had so much fun with this one!

The London Mithraeum, below the Bloomberg Building in the City of London, brings alive the story of the 13th century BCE “Temple of Mithras” and the associated deity and inner sanctum. The challenge here was to manifest the temple without building it, in the most unobtrusive, yet engaging way possible. The innovative solution was to use a very discrete fog curtain into which the walls of the temple could be projected, creating the illusion of the temple without causing any injury to the artifacts.

The National Science and Technology Medals Foundation builds inclusive STEM communities across the United States. To increase visitor engagement in understanding different scientific principles, this project built web-based scientific interactive experiences (labs) integrated directly into the NationalMedals.org website. The 3 "labs" were related to principles of gravity, sight and sound.

The project required technical oversight to integrate with the existing content and website, and push the envelope of what Javascript could do.

The resulting gamified experiences increased visitor engagement, to learn the process of science along with information about the medals and their winners.

Brendan McGetrick, Creative Director, and I had the opportunity to present some of the concepts behind the Museum of the Future. We have presented the philosophy behind the experiences in other settings. But we released the final piece of the experience, the MOTF Navigator, our Mobile App, in 2024 right before OFFF! The compelling feature of Navigator is that it interacts with the physical space. This is a new form of immersive engagement that we have not seen in museums before - - interaction with the space from the visitor's personal device. In this talk we provide both the broad concept of the MOTF exhibitions, but also dig into how the Navigator interaction works.

S3 Ep 069 Sundar Raman Wants You To Consider a 50-Year Future of Kindness. I had a wonderful conversation with R Blank, digging into technology's impact on human interactions, and the importance of keeping a focus on kindness (in multiple contexts) in the digital age.

The Broadway Theater district in midtown Manhattan, in New York, has endless stories. You can come at it from the perspective of the actors, the individual theater buildings, or even their locations in the footprint of Manhattan. Each approach has incredible depth and breadth.

Representing this diversity on a website provided the opportunity to consider content navigation as part of the design. The website allows exploration of the depth and breadth of the stories using similar gestural approaches. 

The content in environments like this is rarely static. So this required a well defined technical strategy for content management, which ensured long-term reliability and stability. The solution was based on a well vetted Open Source CMS, that allowed for all the user-experience customization we needed.

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Internet of Things devices are incredibly useful to the home, but how do we convey their functionality when their core features are hidden behind opaque walls? Well, just make the walls transparent! The Target Open House concept store in San Francisco, was designed to both educate and guide customers to get deeper insights into IOT devices' functioning.

The Body Metrics experience was designed to give visitors an understanding of their biometric data as compared to others in their vicinity, with the premise that data is more meaningful when contextualized with others.
The experience used a variety of cutting-edge technology to explore human physiology and emotions interactively. Visitors wore a set of biometric sensors, connected to a mobile device, which collected the data and sent it to a background machine learning system. The visitor’s journey culminated at an interactive touch table where they could visualize their data in summary form, but also contextualize it against others who engaged in the experience over time.
This type of shared experience helped to foster a shared, data-driven journey of discovery into the human body and emotions, through the use of some advanced technologies.