The Museum of Broken Relationships

The Museum of Broken Relationships in Pittsburgh

Overview

Role

Lead Experience Designer

Duration

2016 Fall (5 Months)

Tasks

Interior Design
Interactive installation design

Tools

Photoshop

Illustrator

SketchUp

HTML/CSS

Background

Project Ex is the design team for the Museum of Broken Relationships: Pittsburgh. MoBR is a traveling exhibition featuring human stories about relationship loss, through the objects these relationships leave behind. Ranging in subject, these objects become shorthand for human storytelling.

Our client, Carnegie Mellon University Professor of English Jane Bernstein, and her class will interview donors for objects and stories from Pittsburgh. Taking these stories, we design the guest experience to mix the local stories within those from the museum’s permanent collection. We aim to engage the guest in interactive storytelling during their visit. The show will run for the month of December 2016 at The Mine Factory in Pittsburgh.

Interior Design

Factory theming

Heritage of Pittsburgh, People's storage their heart broke the story in a factory storage place.

Location: The Mine factory (201 N Braddock Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15208) www.theminefactory.com/

Space : 2000 sqft (approx) Gallery ABC

Gallery design renders in factory style. Tool: SketchUp

Experience Design

We intended to design an emotional journey for our guests to experience from light-hearted, sad, angry to humor.

Challenges :

Despite we know the stories we collected in the gallery are all sad. We noticed that some of them have secondary emotions associated with them, so we try our best to categorize and place them into a different emotional zone. And many guests do feel the emotions while they are in the specific emotion area.

Interactive installations

In the museum, we designed two interaction installations for guests to share their feelings.

#1

Misty Window

The misty window is mainly for people to interact by leaving short messages. When guests receiving a previous message, the message shows up and disappears gradually. The themed of "let go" is what we want to tight into the whole MoBR experience.

#2

The Typewriter

The typewriter is an interaction piece for people to share longer stories. It combined the old and new technology. We convert a typewriter to a modern keyboard. After guests type in their story, our system will calculate the most common words appear in those stories and create a word cloud. Word cloud showcases different cities' words when people share their heartbroken stories.