Yuki Collins

Visual & Motion Designer

Life Among the Grasses

Unified Field for The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk · 2024

A visitor uses the touchscreen kiosk set into the illustrated salt marsh exhibition wall.

A marsh you can touch.

MY ROLE

UI and UX design for the touchscreen kiosks, from layout and button behavior to the illustrations on the screens.

Design A. The Indigenous Peoples screen with topic cards on a flat panel beside an illustrated marsh.
Design A. The interface sits apart from the marsh.
Design B. The same screen built into the marsh, with lily pads as topic buttons.
Design B. The interface becomes the marsh, with lily pads as buttons.
The final Indigenous Peoples screen, with tabs, a language toggle and round topic buttons over the marsh.
The client chose A. B mixed an overhead view with a side view, an accuracy problem for a natural history museum. The final interface keeps A’s structure, with B’s tabs, language toggle and rounder buttons.

Visitors explore four connected storylines through wildlife, stories, and play, with the exhibition’s visual language reshaped for touch.

Illustrations from the kiosks. A horse and hay cart, an osprey, a man rowing a boat, a heron, a sparrow, a turtle, a muskrat, a fiddler crab, a clam and a horseshoe crab, with speech bubbles reading Explore and How to Play.

Wildlife, boats and working scenes in one illustrated style, accurate enough for a natural history museum. The animals also deliver the prompts.

Salt Hay Harvest, instruction. A muskrat explains how to tap Step and Scythe in time with the farmers.

Each game runs through four states. Instruction, practice, play, score. The timing cue and the button light up together, so players never look in two places.

Practice. The Step button glows as the farmer steps forward.
Play. Scythe lights up and the screen reads Perfect cut.
Score. Your timing was Excellent, with counts for perfect, good, ok and off.
Next Social Lab Unified Field for Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles · 2021