Interactive, Museum, Underwater, Victorian

What's In The Box?

An interactive museum exhibit, imagined

Category
Interactive exhibit concept · UX/UI, illustration & 3D
Programme
MSc Design for Interactive Media, University of Edinburgh
Role
Solo, concept, narrative, illustration, 3D modelling, UI

A speculative interactive kiosk for a natural history-style museum. Visitors uncover a barnacle-crusted box recovered from the North Sea, believed to have belonged to a Victorian woman, and unlock its secret compartment of vintage makeup, piece by piece.

UX/UI design, illustration & 3D, case study recap

What's In The Box?

  • Solo Project
  • University of Edinburgh
  • Museum interaction concept

  • Role

    Concept & Interaction Designer Narrative → storyboard → IA → UI → 3D asset design

  • Tools

    Procreate, Blender Illustration, 3D modelling & rendering, UI layout

  • Format

    Museum touchscreen kiosk Designed for an in-gallery interactive exhibit

The brief

Turn a museum object into an interaction

The brief for Design for Interactive Media was open: design the interface for an interactive museum exhibit. Rather than illustrating an existing artefact, I invented one, a box, its backstory, and the objects hidden inside it, so the interaction itself could carry the discovery.

Proposed concept

In the story, a group of deep-sea explorers recover a locked wooden box from the North Sea. Museum visitors play the role of that discovery: they read the find's backstory, then unlock and explore the box's compartments to reveal what's believed to be a Victorian woman's hidden collection of makeup.

  • Narrative-led UX
  • Interaction design
  • Illustration
  • 3D modelling

  • Research

    Started from a two-word brief I set myself, “vintage makeup”, and built a mood board of period tins, lipsticks and perfume bottles to ground the object world.

  • Design

    Sketched and 3D-modelled the box and every artefact inside it, then built the screen flow around a single interaction: open, explore, read.

  • Delivery

    Full UI for a touchscreen exhibit, home, story, explore and gallery, styled to feel hand-found rather than manufactured.

Research & inspiration

Vintage makeup, and a box that locks like a memory

The mood board set the object language; a real, gifted keepsake set the mechanism. The box's clasp is modelled directly on the brass lock of a sketchbook given to me by a friend, carried through into the exhibit's own branding.

Mood board of vintage makeup references, tins, lipsticks, perfume bottles and period advertisements
Mood board built from period packaging, adverts and toiletry catalogues, collected around the idea of “vintage makeup.”
Inspiration board showing a red sketchbook's brass locking clasp, alongside early box sketches and views
Inspired by the locking mechanism of a sketchbook gifted by a friend, the box was modelled in Blender from these early orthographic sketches.

Object design

Every artefact, sketched and modelled

Each item inside the box, a rouge tin, a lipstick, a perfume bottle, was sketched first, then built as a 3D asset so it could be lit, rotated and dropped straight into the UI.

Hand sketches and 3D renders of vintage makeup objects: a rouge compact, lipstick tube and perfume bottle
Sketches through to final 3D renders for the box's hidden contents.
3D exploded view of the wooden box showing its internal compartments and a hidden drawer
Exploded view of the box, with barnacles added to its exterior since it's meant to have been recovered from under the sea. Internal compartments open in stages, ending in a hidden drawer.

Information architecture

Mapping the flow before the visuals

Paper storyboards and a flow diagram came first, working through how a visitor moves between the home screen, the story, and the box itself, including how the “explore” loop of triggering, selecting and reading an object should branch and return.

Hand-drawn storyboards and information architecture diagrams, plus a formal flowchart from Home through Explore, Story and Gallery
Early storyboarding and hand-drawn information architecture, refined into the full flow: Home → Explore/Story/Gallery → interactive box → object selection and description.

Visual design

An interface that feels found, not built

The homepage background is a digital painting made in Procreate; UI elements like the buttons were designed to read as rugged and aged, but still playful, carved wood for navigation, ornate metal framing for the story panels.

Left: the homepage background, painted in Procreate. Right: the button system, carved wood for the main navigation, ornate metal framing for the story panels, designed to evoke ruggedness and age in a playful way.

The experience

Home, story, explore

The finished flow gives visitors a reason to explore before they're asked to interact, a short backstory sets up the box, then the exhibit opens into an object-by-object discovery.

Finished homescreen with title and three navigation buttons, and the story screen presenting a handwritten backstory on aged paper props
Home screen (Story / Explore Box / Gallery) and the Story screen, a handwritten backstory laid over period props, giving visitors context before they open the box.
Explore screen showing the box opening with bubble particle animation, and an artefact information screen for a pocket watch
Explore screen: visitors click the box and its objects to trigger the opening animation, with bubble particle effects giving the empty space movement. Selecting an object surfaces its description alongside the rest of the set, with a slight rotation animation on each object for a 360° view.

Design system

A palette pulled from the seabed and the box

Colour and type stayed consistent across every screen: teal seabed tones for exploration, warm wood and brass for navigation, aged parchment for narrative moments.

Reflection

What the project pulled together

  • 4

    Screens designed end to end: Home, Story, Explore and Gallery

  • 6+

    Original 3D-modelled artefacts, from sketch to render

  • 1

    Fictional object world built from a single two-word brief

Working across narrative, illustration, 3D modelling and interaction design end to end pushed me to treat the object itself, its material, its history, its mechanism, as the source of every UI decision, rather than styling a generic interface after the fact.