A Food Journey - AMNH

The Food Journey is a mobile game concept designed for the American Museum of National History and their existing Explorer App.  

A set of interactive cooking moments, guessing games, and postcard recipe collection, the Food Journey extends the experience of a visitor through the museum's cultural halls.  Watch our museum presentation of both minigames prototyped here.

Responding to a call to action from the Museum's communications team to bring it’s permanent exhibits to life, we devised a set of one-touch interactive moments that could highlight, unify and elevate the cultural heritage on display.

Players follow digital footsteps on a designed path between the cultural halls, discover  animated cooking scenes, illustrated guessing games, and collect a card set of modern day recipes, inspired by items on location. This digital enhancement of a visitor’s walk through the museum connects the diversity of the exhibits under a global theme, and carries their experience back out into the world.  Our prototyped examples shows two moments from a larger user experience, a multiple choice visual quiz around a Micronesian coconut scraper stool and a step by step mini-game on Haudenosaunee corn cake making. 

The goal was to give visitors a glimpse into the timelessness of the world’s food traditions. We were also intent on integrating our proposal into the pre-existing visitor mobile app of the American Museum of National History, it’s interface, interactions and style guide. This involved planning the user experience; icon design, content selection and validation, interactive design, with a focus on non-linear player progression and accomplishment feedback.
Follow the entire process here.

This proof of concept was designed and prototyped over 2 months with Samina Trachier and Ge Chang  as a part of a Designing For Museums  class with instructor Matt Parker as MFA candidate at NYU's Game Center in spring 2020, in regular consultation with AMNH advisors.