Razorfish
Leveraging the art of interactive storytelling to help the public learn from our nation's best museums & cultural institutions
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Elevating the art of storytelling
Second Story Interactive Studios, now part of Razorfish, is based in Portland, Oregon and has a strong focus on interactive storytelling. Many of the clients are national museums or institutions, universities, or corporations who want to install interactive educational kiosks or websites.
I had the pleasure of meeting with the (then) small studio for a customer visit when I was Product Manager for Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash. Being so impressed by the way they were leveraging our creative products to build beautiful interactives for such important institutions, I worked in-house at the studio for a month to study first-hand how they used our product. A couple years later, I moved to Portland to work for Second Story. I lasted three years in the damp, gray weather before deciding to return to Macromedia, just before we were acquired by Adobe.
While I was at Second Story I was responsible for producing twelve award-winning projects ranging from web sites to kiosks for world renowned clients including National Geographic, Nintendo, Getty Museum, and The Smithsonian. I coordinated all design and development efforts, owned all client relationships, represented the studio as spokesperson at conferences, and acted as a chief technical advisor for projects.
TITLE
Senior Producer
SCOPE
Client Management, Creative Direction, Project Management, Technical Innovation
12
Projects led over 3 years
SEGMENT
Consumers, Museum Visitors
1m+
Users Reached
3
years (2002-2005)
AIGA | AIGA Design Archives
This interactive archive provides broad accessibility to an extensive collection of contemporary design for research and reference.
AIGA, the professional association for communication design, is the place that design professionals turn to first to exchange ideas and information, participate in critical analysis and research, and advance education and ethical practices. The AIGA Design Archives are a record of annual juried selections of design excellence and the work of designers honored by the AIGA. The winning entries from the most recent annual are presented in a unique, reactive interface that facilitates rapid discovery. Thousands of works are presented in the archive browsing mode, where fields of thumbnails reward visual exploration, while the search mode serves focused inquiries with robust filtering options. A powerful lightbox feature allows visitors to make custom collections, write notes for every record, add curatorial text throughout their collections, share their collections, and publish unique slideshows for colleagues or classrooms to experience.
J. Paul Getty Museum | Timescape
The arts of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean are contextualized in this large, interactive timeline-map installation at the Getty Villa.
The Getty Villa, the original home of the J. Paul Getty Museum, is an educational center and museum dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. To help visitors contextualize where and when objects in the collection are from, the TimeScape gallery features a large interactive installation with a timeline, animated maps, and slideshows. Visitors interact with a freestanding controller positioned in the center of the gallery where they can select eleven different Mediterranean cultures and time periods spanning from the Cycladic Civilization (3200–200 B.C.) to the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire (A.D.476–565). As selections are made, the timeline animates, the map zooms and pans into position, and informational overlays animate on the maps to show geopolitical boundaries, trade routes, and regions of influence. Slideshows feature imagery of the locations as well as objects in the collection that correspond to the selected culture.
MOMA | Kiki Smith: Books, Prints and Things
Kiki Smith’s printed work, with footage and features that reveal her creative process, form the focus of a Web site and onsite installation.
Kiki Smith is among the most significant artists of her generation. Known primarily as a sculptor, she has also devoted herself to printmaking, which she considers an equally vital part of her work. The Museum of Modern Art exhibition ''Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things'' and its accompanying catalogue showcase the scope of Smith’s printed art and presents it thematically, focusing on such topics as anatomy, self-portraiture, nature, and female iconography. Reflecting the same thematic arrangement, the Web site and on-site kiosks foster a rich understanding of her innovative body of printed art, illustrating over 135 works in more than 50 comparative groupings.
Rather than just offering snapshots of Smith’s artwork, the concept for the interactive exhibition was to create a contiguous and fluid approach that would offer visitors a truly engaging experience. Visitors are transported into the online gallery with the ability to zoom into each artwork, bringing the smallest details of the artist’s work to life. Visitors can explore the virtual “gallery walls,” following a seamless journey through the landscape of each theme, zooming and panning from one view to the next. Through video footage of the artist working in print workshops and details of two prints in various stages of development, visitors experience Smith’s creative process firsthand. People hear Smith, see her working, and are immersed in the layered approach of printmaking.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum | Witness to History
An animated 3-D map with narration in these interactives provides context to the Signal Corps photographs that document the Allies’ path from Normandy to Austria, from D-Day to VE-Day
Signal Corps photographers accompanied American troops throughout the offensive across Europe against Nazi Germany, “documenting the path of liberation.” In concert with the opening of the National World War II Memorial on the national mall, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unveiled “Witness to History,” an exhibition of original Signal Corps photographs with seven interactive kiosks. Each of the kiosks features an in-depth interactive program where visitors can follow the allies through seventeen segments that defined their path. Each step along the way a 3-D map animates from location to location as narrators set up each milestone in the offensive. As the historical stills and footage from the Signal Corps photographers animates, visitors hear the words of the photographers, soldiers, and witnesses whose stories illuminate the imagery. In addition to this narrative presentation, a photo gallery provides unmediated access to all the photographs on view with commentary by J. M. Heslop, former Signal Corps photographer.
National Institutes of Health: Changing the Face of Medicine
Three interfaces drive a large presentation where visitors can rediscover, contextualize, and learn more about the hundreds of physicians featured in the exhibition.
The Digital Photo Gallery is a celebratory, culminating experience where the pantheon of women physicians that “changed the face of medicine” come together in one spectacular, group interactive installation. Here, three single-user kiosks control a large, 22-foot projected wall of faces as visitors discover physicians based on their location, their inspiration, their specialty, or their achievements. As visitors interact with the different kiosks, the faces on the wall react to show which physicians correspond to the various inquiries. A baseball-card-like record for each physician gives more biographical information about every woman in the exhibition, providing a kind of appendix to the exhibit experience.
Smithsonian National Museum of American History | America on the Move
A powerful collection database drives this online exhibition of American transportation history filled with interconnected pathways, games, and learning resources.
Transportation transformed America. This dynamic companion Web site to the largest exhibition to ever have been installed in the National Museum of American History explores the past two centuries of how Americans took to the rails, roads, and water, driving the economic and cultural life of the nation. The heart of the online presentation consists of three main sections through which online visitors can seamlessly weave unique experiences tailored to their inquiry. Visitors get a historical overview in the Exhibition section, which gives context to the themes and glues together the objects chronologically. Intuitive browse and search features in the Collection section provide access to over 1,500 transportation-related artifacts and photographs. Diverse viewpoints on a variety of related topics are explored in the Themes section, where curators and historians continue to contribute new stories using artifacts and images from the collection. The addition of learning resources and three fun games makes the entire site a wonderful rich resource for collectors, enthusiasts, teachers, and students.
In contrast to traditional exhibition Web sites that segregate database-driven collections sections from fixed narrative presentations, the entire structure of this site is built on a scalable database backend. This allows the collection to grow, and curated, thematic, or mediated experiences can be dynamically created at any time. Through a browser-based storytelling tool, curators at the Smithsonian create custom groupings of records, and write and publish paginated stories with custom layouts. Every image on every page of the site links to the object record in the collection; visitors can shift gears to see selected record images within other contexts and parts of the site. This interconnected, cross-pollinated approach allows visitors to explore a multitude of different pathways and perspectives that reflect unique interests, experiences, and curiosities, and the scalable structure will continue to grow over time with new objects and points of view.
Smithsonian National Museum of American History | A More Perfect Union
This online exhibition examines the stories of Japanese Americans whose rights were violated as they were interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Kiki Smith is among the most significant artists of her generation. Known primarily as a sculptor, she has also devoted herself to printmaking, which she considers an equally vital part of her work. The Museum of Modern Art exhibition ''Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things'' and its accompanying catalogue showcase the scope of Smith’s printed art and presents it thematically, focusing on such topics as anatomy, self-portraiture, nature, and female iconography. Reflecting the same thematic arrangement, the Web site and on-site kiosks foster a rich understanding of her innovative body of printed art, illustrating over 135 works in more than 50 comparative groupings.
U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum | Anne Frank the Writer
Anne Frank’s ideas, spirit, and creative process come to life through narration, animation, glimpses from her life, and her own handwriting in this rich-media online exhibition.
Opening on what would have been her 74th birthday, the ''Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story'' exhibition at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a tribute and celebration of Anne’s short but remarkable life as a writer. Between the ages of 13 and 15, Anne Frank wrote stories, fairy tales, essays, and the beginning of a novel. This online companion to the exhibition reveals the original writings—through sound and images—of a young woman who had great ambition to be a writer and was exploring her craft. In five unique sections of the rich-media online exhibition, ''An Unfinished Story,'' Anne’s ideas, spirit, and creative process come to life through narration, animation, glimpses from her life, and her own handwriting. Users can browse, page through, and enlarge all the artifacts used throughout the site in Anne’s Original Writings. Video interviews with the director of the museum and the co-curator of the exhibition provide insight into the making of the exhibition, and the Share Your Thoughts section allows visitors to contribute what impact Anne Frank’s writing had on them.
National Geographic | Forces of Nature
The simulators, 3-D models, images, animations, data, and diagrams in this Web site help audiences understand the science behind the earth’s most violent natural events.
Drawing on the rich resources and expertise of National Geographic, this companion site to the IMAX film of the same name dissects the causes of volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. A lab section for each force of nature utilizes 3-D models, illustrations, animations, and diagrams to explore where each phenomenon occurs, what causes them, and how they are measured or classified. At the end of each lab a special interactive lets visitors control the variables that cause each force to create their own volcano, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake. Visitors can view images from historical examples in the case studies section and plot when and where they occurred in the map feature.
Princeston University Art Museum | Creating a Bronze Statue
Web site visitors explore the piece-mold process that was used to create a Chinese tsun from the Western Zhou period as they create their own vessels.
After selecting a design, special tools allow visitors to carve patterns, create molds, then assemble, pour, and release their own creations. Based on an actual artifact from the museum’s collection, the extensive 3-D visualizations and animations help make a complex process intuitive to understand, and the creative tools make the outcome unique and memorable.
Princeston University Art Museum | The Art of Hon'ami Koetsu
Visitors can transcribe a seventeenth-century Japanese scroll, then create their own poems which are painted into it and ready to print from this Web site.
A special tool lets visitors transcribe the calligraphy of Hon’ami Kōetsu on a hand scroll from the collection. Visitors learn about the symbolism of the woodblock-printed mica designs and read the verses, and then they can create their own poems by selecting unique combinations of phrases from the “Shinkokin wakashu.” The poems they compose are converted to calligraphy, embedded back into the scroll, and can then be printed out.
Princeston University Art Museum | Making a Cizhou Vessel
The process of how Cizhou wares were made during China’s Song and Yuan dynasties is revealed as visitors create their own vessel using the Web site’s tools.
Visitors learn each step of the process of creating a Cizhou vessel like those in the museum’s collection as they throw the clay then color, paint, glaze, and fire it. Intermixed with video footage of artisans demonstrating techniques, the extensive 3-D visualizations in the activities let visitors make their own creative decisions to particularize their vessel throughout each stage. By balancing learning with creativity, this rich-media module engages diverse learning styles and helps make objects in the collection portals of discovery.
Discovery Channel | Unwrapped: The Mysterious World of Mummies
Users probe beneath layers of linen mummy wrappings to move between story levels and discover the mummies hidden within this media-rich Web site.
Visitors to Discovery’s TLC site unwrap a world of mummies as they explore “how the dead are living’” The Unwrapped site tells the stories of more than 20 naturally and artificially preserved mummies from around the globe—from South America’s Andes and China’s deserts, to Europe’s bogs and Egypt’s tombs. As audiences explore the site, they find and unravel the secrets of both ancient time travelers and surprisingly modern mummies. A blend of science and imagination reveals how each lived, died, and came to survive the ravages of time. A re-creation of an ancient Egyptian tomb lets audiences discover, unwrap, and create an Egyptian mummy, then explore the tomb as it might have looked when the mummy was first sealed in its sarcophagus.
Designed for audiences with high-speed connections, Unwrapped combines animation, story text, music, streaming video, and audio commentary to create an environment that is both cinematic and user-responsive. The site’s design and functionality are inspired by archaeological metaphors and the spirit of exploration. Users probe beneath a layer of linen mummy wrappings to move between story levels and find the mummies hidden underneath. Within each story, a controller lets the user pace the narrative and pause to access media-rich content embedded within animation sequences. In the Egyptian tomb, re-created by 3-D illustrator Jim Ludtke, a custom cursor simulates a flashlight, while a sliding controller lets users make and unwrap a classic Egyptian mummy. Each mummy has a custom soundtrack that transforms 10-second loops into complex, seamless musical scores.
