National Sept 11 Memorial and Museum
Studio: Local Projects
Contributor: Sundar Raman, Technical Director and all Backend Systems
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.
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The interactive experiences at the NS11MM used a variety of technologies to navigate through an enormous amount of data, and a diversity of human voices. However, these technologies were not used for the sake of the newness or attractiveness of the technology itself. In these cases, where we need to provide different ways for stories to be surfaced, we are often required to innovate with every type of available technology so that the stories are as compelling as possible.
Paper is as good a technology as a touch interface or a projection in many cases. However, when we needed to show the incredible range of how New Yorkers used paper to communicate in the immediate aftermath of the event, we had to recreate the emotion of posters around the city, mechanism of leaving messages, and even ways to connect different sources of information.
The exhibitions at the NS11MM were an incredible privilege to be part of many people’s stories. It was a great responsibility to understand how to surface those stories in the most appropriate way possible, whether that was through ways to store and retrieve audio recordings, search using interactive touch interfaces, or navigate events on large scale projection mapping.
This is also an incredible example of how storytelling is an important endeavor for healing and understanding.
Studio: Local Projects
Director of Technology, Systems Architect: Sundar Raman
Creative Director: Katie Lee
Creative Technologists: Rodrigo De Benito Sanz, Philipp Rockel, Andreas Borg
Project Manager: Tiya Gordon
An incredibly and very large team was involved in making all the different exhibits at the NS11MM. This is just a very brief list of those involved directly in the technical experiences.