PRISMATIC
PLAYGROUND

SPRING 2024

FRIST ART MUSEUM
NASHVILLE, TN

INTERACTIVE MEDIA DESIGN

IN COLLABORATION WITH
SCOUT CLOWDUS

UNITY PROTOTYPING
SPACE UTILITY
COLLABORATION

Prismatic playground is an activation of the Frist’s transformative Media space. It serves to provide an interactive experience to the patrons of the museum, primarily focusing on children coming into the space.

PROCESS OVERVIEW

01

Ideation

Creating mood boards, sketching out concepts, and hashing out a couple different project solutions.

02

Solution Refinement

Upon choosing the most promising solution, bringing it to be mocked up and presented in front of the board for review.

03

Development

Bringing in feedback, development of the actual experience begins, creating visual assets and implementing them.

04

Implementation

Following acceptance by the board, the completed experience is established into the space in which it will be used.

01

MOODBOARDING

From this scenario, we built a moodboard to guide the design we would go forward creating. The keywords we developed for our moodboard were:

  • Floaty

  • Pastel

  • Evolving

  • Dreamy

  • Whimsical

IDEATION AND STORYBOARDING

After moodboarding, we decided to move forward with a motif surrounding color, which over time brought us to the idea o bubbles. We chose this direction in large part because we thought there was something unique and wonder-inducing  about bubbles, as well as the ability to interact with them and see them pop.

02

mockups/initial presentation

From our sketches we developed scale mockups and presented them to The Frist alongside the rest of our ideation and moodboarding. From this meeting we were given the go ahead to take our idea and start building the project out.

03

BUilding assets

We built out our assets for the experience, including bubbles, grass, and flowers, as well as background imagery and animations. With these, we went for a very stylized animated approach to the design.

Scout, the illustrator she is, took up a lot of creating these assets, creating a beautiful set of bubbles and grass for us to incorporate into the experience.

EXECUTION

Using Unity, we took the assets we built and incorporated them into the game engine, building the interactive experience. As someone familiar with some coding languages, this was the part of the project I took lead on, making sure everything worked properly. The main features that we incorporated into the experience were the creation of new bubbles in reaction to the movement of the user, turning their movement into a human bubble wand, and wind based movement for the foreground grass and flowers.

final mockup

From our project file, we were able to create this video mockup of how the experience might work in motion.

04

IMPLEMENTATION

The project is now showing at the Frist’s Martin ArtQuest space and being used within the space daily.