Museum of Kansas City
Four interactives that bring undertold Kansas City stories forward, designed for young visitors and guided by restorative practices.
Overview
Four interactives for Kansas City's history museum, designed for young people and guided by restorative practices: bring undertold stories forward and connect the past to the present.
The museum is anchored by Corinthian Hall, a 1910 mansion that has been a public museum since 1940. G&A designed the exhibition media and interactives for its renewed visitor experience.
I led UX on four pieces: Boundaries & Borders, Welcome Corinthian Hall, City Within a City, and Kansas City Voices. Each one moves between two views: the plan seen from above, and the lives lived on the ground.
What shaped the design
- Young people first. The museum named young people as its primary audience, so language, pacing, and interaction were tuned for students.
- Restorative practices. The pieces center stories of harm and resilience, and ask visitors reflective questions instead of only presenting facts.
- Real rooms, real budgets. Several pieces fit into existing displays and hardware. Kansas City Voices had a small budget, so it kept only the features it needed.
- Two rounds of testing. A concept test at the museum with local eighth graders, teachers, and a youth advisory council, then a usability test with high schoolers at G&A's NYC lab.
Four interactives, four ways in
The four pieces don't share an interaction model. Each one follows how its story works best: a shift in perspective, a hunt, a role to play, or a voice to hear.
Two surfaces, two perspectives
A dual-projection piece on how Osage, European, and American views of land shaped modern Kansas City. I proposed the split: an aerial map on the lower surface for the big picture, a first-person view on the upper one for the human scale. Visitors wave a hand over a sensor to choose one of four chapters. Each chapter introduces a group, its view of the land, and a reflective question, then shows what happened. I also defined the sensor states, from idle to active and back.
A house tour turned scavenger hunt
A 360° touchscreen tour of the hall across three eras: family home, natural history museum, and today. Visitors pan around each room, tap artifacts and silhouettes to learn who made or used them, and line up the view to reveal historic photos. Each find is checked off on a collection bar. I designed the flow, from teaching the panning gesture to completing the hunt, and refined the wireframes with the visual designer and technologist.
Composite characters, real neighborhoods
Visitors choose one of four composite characters (African American, Jewish, Mexican, or Italian) and drag them onto a 1940s map to find a place to live. The first try is designed to fail, showing how policy decided who could live where. Visitors then follow the family through generations to today's map. I defined the flow and built the wireframes and interactive prototypes we tested with students.
Listening first
A headphone station of songs, poems, podcasts, and oral histories from Kansas Citians, organized by topic. The flow has three stages: attract, choose a topic and track, then listen with a synced transcript. Audio is harder to navigate than visuals, so I cut decision steps and kept the playback screen simple.
Process
Story maps, sketches, wireframes, and prototypes, tested with students at the museum and in our NYC lab.
Outcome
Installed in Corinthian Hall. The museum's director reviewed each piece on site before signing off.
Every interactive went through two rounds of student testing before build, and on-site reviews with museum leadership before opening.