This was the third major international exhibition held by The International Museum of the Horse at The Kentucky Horse Park and included a 3 year search for art and artifacts from Riyadh, Cairo, Paris, London, Berlin, New Orleans, New York, Boston, and numerous other cities across the globe. The depth and range of the exhibit was breathtaking to say the least, and I was honored to be asked to create a companion exhibition interactive to share a deeper narrative on some of the more illustrious objects.

The Solution

I organized the interactive into key areas that reflected the exhibition narrative, thus allowing the piece to have a consistent voice within the exhibit space. These main areas consisted of a timeline, a map room, a zoom & pan object viewer, and cultural exploration. A mySQL database was created that contained the referenced exhibit artifacts and an XML feed was produced as the main point of data for the Flash-based interactive kiosk. This allowed us the flexibility to perform important tasks – first and foremost, artifacts could be edited outside of the presentation layer without specialized skills. And, artifacts could be entered into the database once but accessed across multiple key areas without requiring duplicated efforts – so you could see where an artifact was on the timeline but also geographically in the map room.

The Details

  • Support the Brand – A monumental exhibition with a fully developed, internal brand meant staying within stylistic and aesthetic guidelines
  • Adobe Flash & Actionscript 3
  • Adobe Desktop AIR Application – Facilitates easy remote updating of the touchscreen
  • Adobe PhotoShop & Adobe Illustrator
  • mySQL Database and XML – Using XML allowed artifact administration without disturbing the presentation layer
  • Creative Direction – Developed the initial narrative and design direction and directed facilitation
  • Project Management – Managed the scope with a tight deadline as well as my own internal staff of programming and design
  • Client Communication – A project of this scale requires constant attention. Meetings and client discussions were frequent and necessary to allow all the details to come together