Client
Computer History Museum
Year
2025
Location
San Francisco
(USA)
Role
Digital identity,
Interactive direction,
Prototyping,
UX / UI
Category
Museum,
Repository,
Archives
Founded in 1996, the Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, is a non-profit institution dedicated to preserving and documenting the history of computing and its impact on society.
Housing over 100,000 artifacts spanning the history of computing and technology, the collections include historic computers, hardware, software, photographs, documents and oral histories, showcasing the technological innovations and influential individuals that shaped the digital age.
They approached us with the ambition of bringing their vast historical catalogue online for users to explore, showcasing their objects, archives and oral histories under a unified digital experience.
My role as the design director for the digital portal involved exploring new paths to open access to their materials through a searchable database for experienced researchers, while building explorative tools for non-specialist audiences. I ran a three day workshop with their staff in San Francisco to present and refine the prototype before shipping for production.
Interactive direction
The interface acts as an extension to the museum, primarily targeting research and scholarship where powerful database quiries, machine generated content and relational data interconnect the stories of computing artifacts.
Digital identity
Utilising the brands primary red as a signal for interactivity and pathways for discovery, the design features animated circuitry patterns and clear hierarchy for navigating.
Discovery wall
Expressing a wall of nostalogia featuring two-dimensional scrolling for users to explore collection highlights.
Searching the repository
Supporting browsing a hierarchal tree structure adhering to archival standards, with filters to specify category, type, format and location, currently on display in the museum.
Artifacts in focus
Enabling searching within object records, presenting machine generated data, multipart objects and multimedia libraries.
