Moonlanders
Moonlanders is a team of designers, programmers and artists collaborating with the Moonshot Museum. Our goal was to create 3 prototypes that are intended to enhance the theatre, clean room and habitat areas of the museum with a focus on learning through interactivity.
My Role
Experience Designer, Assistant Producer
Team
Anton Renouf, Angelina Shi, Derek Williams, Tairan Guo, Caiyu Zhang
Client
Moonshot Museum
Timeline
January - April 2023
Overview
The Moonshot Museum is a new Pittsburgh space museum dedicated to career and community readiness for the space industry of today and tomorrow. In partnership with Astrobotic, the Moonshot Museum offers visitors an unprecedented opportunity to get up close and behind the scenes of the 21st century space industry.
Our goal was to explore and document potential exhibit designs for the Moonshot Museum to develop and build in the future.
Initial Information
The Museum
Use case persona
- The most common visitors to the museum are families, with children aged 7 and above on average.
User Research
I spent a day at the museum, observing the dynamics of guest groups and individuals, noting how they reacted and engaged to the exhibits. Below are my findings, which helped inform our design decisions.
Prototype 1 - Payload Packing
Platform
PC
Area
Clean Room
Learning objective
As the clean room was not always in operation, the museum wanted guests to learn more about what Astrobotic does as a business
Payload Packing was designed to be a fun, simple interactive experience that enabled guests to choose what items would be loaded onto the Lunar Lander and sent to the moon. All the payloads in the experience are real items Astrobotic has sent to the moon.
Design Document
User testing
Interaction Example
Prototype 2 - AR Moon Colony
Platform
Tilt Five AR Board
Area
Habitat
Learning objective
Understand the different components and combinations of infrastructure to enable a future human civilisation to thrive on the moon.
Leveraging the exciting possibilities of the new Tilt Five AR Board, we designed this experience to be a shared experience between 3 guests, who can create a small moon civilisation through adding and removing different pieces of infrastructure.
As the Tilt Five AR board was built to make board games 3D, I thought it would be a great addition to the Habitat area of the museum. It contributed to creating an idea of what futuristic home or communal environments could be like on the moon with the technology we would have available.
Design Document
User testing
Interaction Example
Prototype 3 - Mission Control
Platform
Roleplaying / PC
Area
Theater
Learning objective
Understand the different roles of and how a launch is conducted at Astrobotic's Mission Control
A lot of portrayals of Mission Control environments in films and other media present it as an action packed environment full of adrenaline. The design of this experience is meant to inform guests what an actual Mission Control environment is like at Astrobotic.
The roles of the different teams was abstracted, designed to represent the elements of the job through interesting interactions for guests
Design Document
Project Documentation
I wrote the project documentation, which served as a guide for the future developers turning our experiences into complete exhibits.
Reflections
The Moonshot Museum is a new Pittsburgh space museum dedicated to career and community readiness for the space industry of today and tomorrow. In partnership with Astrobotic, the Moonshot Museum offers visitors an unprecedented opportunity to get up close and behind the scenes of the 21st century space industry.
Our goal was to explore and document potential exhibit designs for the Moonshot Museum to develop and build in the future.