LKCNHM*

A phygital museum experience for Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, where touchpoints are installed around the museum space in order to unlock the corresponding digital section of the app.

Details

Roles

Fields

, , , ,

Year

2022

Details

Roles

During internship in Design Incubation Centre

  • Kent Limanza – Interface and App Development, UX Design
  • Yuta Nakayama – Interface and App Development, NFC Implementation
  • Chan Khee Hwee – Graphics Design
  • Tommy Cheong – Product Design
  • Poh Yun Ru – Photography and Videography
  • Chan Khee Hwee – Communications
  • Yeo Wan Jun – Communications

Fields

, , , ,

Year

Jan – Apr 2023

Meet the Team

Project Summary

LKCNHM* is an app launched in collaboration with Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (LKCNHM), Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore.

This is an adaptation of Musee*, a project originally designed by Hoang Ahn, a 2020 graduate from the Division of Industrial Design. Upon her graduation, the project was incubated at DIC where further developments were made and collaborations with museums were initiated.

With the new LKCNHM* app, visitors can now experience expeditions of naturalists in Singapore to uncover new scientific discoveries. The app users can tap on NFC tags located around the exhibition to unlock exciting digitally augmented activities on their phones – from packing the essentials for the expeditions to identifying and sorting the specimens. Each activity contains information around a specific exhibit in comprehensible bits for visitors to understand and absorb easily, making learning an enjoyable and engaging experience.

The app is unveiled during LKCNHM’s 8th Anniversary celebration on 18 April 2023, which coincides with the arrival of Alfred Russel Wallace in Singapore in 1854. Visitors can learn and explore the early works of natural history and exploration in a fun and interactive way.

Listed as “LKCNHM*”, the app is available for download on the App Store and Google Play Store.

Early Iterations

Musee* is a digital platform that enhances the museum journey for young visitors using Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies. Similar to a digital treasure hunt, the young visitors are prompted to go around the exhibits tapping on readers with an NFC token that unlock digitally augmented activities on their accompanying adult’s phone. The collaboration project adapts Musee* to complement two existing exhibits at LKCNHM, namely the Heritage Gallery and Alfred Russel Wallace’s expeditions, in commemoration of the date of his arrival in Singapore. The LKCNHM* app will be available for visitors to download and use at LKCNHM.

What I Did

  • Benchmarked existing museum apps, their user flow and app elements
  • Designed user flow and medium-fidelity, interactable prototype app on Figma
  • Developed and refine pages, user flow consistency, components, and widgets for some sections of the app on Flutter
  • Asset management with the graphic team on Airtable and GitHub issue tracking
  • Developed the game design/engine and state management on p5.js for most of the game sections:
  • Jigsaw puzzle inventory management: Biggest challenge was collision detection of irregular polygonal shapes, state management (answered options must still show tooltip)
  • Bucket sorting game: Mostly user interactions (p5.js doesn’t have UI components), e.g. screen flash and disappearing popup on correct/wrong answers, as well as state management of the animal answers (touch, visibility, etc)
  • Clue searching game:
    • Engine: creating a side scrolling background with clickable floating clue buttons, state management
    • UI: modal popup that has a carousel of infographics