BioMuseo
Interactive exhibits for three galleries in the BioMuseo, a Frank Gehry designed museum about biodiversity in Panama City, Panama.
Role: Experience Designer
I worked as a strategist and experience designer on this project from the initial competitive proposal to the concept and design stages. This project was completed at Tellart.
The conceptual flow connecting all the three galleries.
Experience Overview
Located on Panama City’s Causeway, the BioMuseo tells the story of bio-diversity on the Panamanian Isthmus. Each gallery tells a unique and immersive story that supports and encourages group learning and interaction.
Process
Working with clients based in Panama, we employed an iterative process of design presented through regular calls and presentations.
Trips to Panama also let us understand the complex biodiversity of Panama, itself, and enabled us to study and work out technical details of the gallery space, environmental lighting, visitor flows, operational needs, and spatial layouts.
Back in the workshop, we created focused prototypes at multiple scales to explore design and technological considerations.
Oceans Divided
When you step into the Oceans Divided gallery you’ll enter a unique soundscape making you feel as though you’re underwater. Two large aquariums flank either side of the gallery each representing a different ocean (Pacific and Caribbean). When the isthmus of Panama rose millions of year ago it divided one ocean into two, the Caribbean and Pacific. The interactives in this gallery contrast and compare both oceans, relaying key evolutionary stories and defining characteristics.
The Living Web
In the Living Web, you are surrounded by a dazzling sculpture that represents a unique species relationships that exist in the rainforest. To augment the sculpture and communicate important stories we placed audio listening stations near key story moments in the sculpture. These stations tell compelling and immersive audio stories that describe surprising and memorable species relationships.
Panama is The Museum
In Panama Is the Museum, the last gallery in the BioMuseo, visitors encounter an immersive, brightly-colored world in which Panama’s various natural and cultural landscapes are represented in pattern cells on the floor. In the center of the space is an abstracted sculptural form derived from Panama’s geography.
As visitors walk through the gallery, pattern cells expand to reveal imagery of what can be experienced in Panama. If a visitor steps on an expanded floor cell, the imagery travels to the central form to reveal large visual displays projected on the 3-dimensional sculpture. Images and text appear encouraging visitors to seek out new uniquely Panamanian experiences: “Make Mola” or “Kayak through the Jungle”.
The purpose of the gallery is to showcase the wide array of unique experience Panama has to offer and to turn museum visitors into travelers, sending them off on their next adventure.
