Selected projects
Public Access Kiosks

Over the years, we’ve created many public-access kiosks for museums and visitor centers. The audience is typically age ten to adult, and the tone is educational.

We would work with clients to understand concepts and clarify communication goals. The next challenge was to translate sophisticated concepts into brief activities. Typically our company took projects from concept development, to design, production, and installation.

Most of these kiosks are still in active service today, some after more than a decade, designed on hardware not much more powerful than a modern cell phone. Good communication is not about technology.

According to the Royal Ontario Museum, our exhibits have “proven to be robust and highly engaging installations for many thousands of visitors over the years,” (Brian Porter, Director, New Media Resources.)

Also relevant to the challenge of creating a user-friendly teachers’ interface, these kiosk installations included ‘administrator’ interfaces which allowed staff to change settings and track usage. And it all had to work with a touch screen.

Light and Gemstones was our second project for the ROM, completed in 1993. This activity-based project, teaches the properties of various gems by allowing users to manipulate molecular structure, refraction, etc., via a series of surprisingly simple 3D models.

Spruce bog roulette, one of two games created for Algonquin Park, teaches sophisticated concepts about mortality of wild animals.

For Ontario’s mineral wealth, which was shown at Science North in Sudbury, we made a series of rooms that the audience could explore, and learn the mined materials in everyday objects.

Selected projects:	Echo Lake Public Access Kiosks Southam True North Canadian Encyclopedia Simon & Schuster R&D Freaky Stories Mighty Mites on AOL
Selected links:	Recent work Burying the Fish, by Cory Doctorow Mackerel.com circa 1996
Contact smackerel:	phone 416 588-6466 email dave or kevin@smackerel.net comments