"where in the world?"

Class project to create an interactive museum exhibit aimed at letting the participants experience being a detective.

Collaborators: Amanda Dennis, Fan Cheng.

prototyping

We used the metaphor of a scavenger hunt to design a museum exhibit that offers participants the chance to experience being a crime detective. We hid clues on multiple floors of a building and armed participants with futuristic gadgets, including a magnifying glass and a radio, and recorded them scouring the building for the clues to solve a hypothetical murder.

We drew inspiration from Carmen Sandiego, a popular computer game and television series that began in the 1980s. Similar to Carmen Sandiego, when the participants find a clue they also find an actor who is there to accompany the clue. This way, the participants not only scoured the building for artifacts, but also used the actors as aids in their search.

The magnifying glass and the radio were constructed mainly out of legos in order to give them a lighthearted feeling, and also help participants accept the 'futuristic' (read: infeasible) ways in which the artifacts worked. The magnifying glass worked by pointing the participants in the general direction of the next clue (acted out by the facilitator verbally describing where the magnifying glass points). The radio worked to keep the participant in contact with one of the actors they had previously met (acted out by the facilitator pretending to take the role of a previous actor).

The experience began with the participant entering the exhibit, had two clues for the participant to find, and ended when the participant had enough proof to confront and convict the killer.