Asia Society Texas: Explore Asia

Bringing the culture of Asian languages, food, music, travel, and influencers within reach for all.

We were asked to help Asia Society of Texas create an entirely new exhibit and program for teaching visitors more about Asian and Asian American culture, history, and life. 

My Role:

From concept to installation I was the design lead for the project. It was my job to help facilitate concept brainstorming sessions with partner teams, our internal team, and the client. I also oversaw two junior designers to complete work for important project milestones. I also advised on content development for each of the interactive exhibits.

Gateway to Asia:

Starting as the first experience visitors engage with during their visit, we created a palette cleanser that would help visitors leave their assumptions of Asian countries at the door. The goal was to show visitors how similar their home of Houston was to each country in small digestable ways. 

Many visitors’ favorite feature of the interactive was the ability to compare the size of Texas to the country they were viewing to help contextualize scale and distance in a way they were more familiar with.

Gathering Table:

While brainstorming in a concepting session with our partner team, a colleague shared her experience growing up as a Chinese American and her classmates at lunch being grossed out by the packed lunch her mother made her each day and not wanting to trade snacks.

We all agreed that we wanted to create an experience about Asian and Asian American food to help stop children from finding other cultures’ foods gross and weird but see how similar they are to foods they love or taste similar.

In this free exploration interactive, visitors put together a lunch box containing various snacks, dishes, drinks, and desserts from Asian, Asian American, and Houstononian culture. Once selected, each food has a information on the pronunciation, flavors, and a QR code that can be scanned to find that food locally in Houston for people to try. Visitors are also shown a menu of smiliar foods they can easily swap between to see foods that might interest them.

Train to Asia:

We wanted the next experience to be “transportive” and so we designed a magical bullet train that would show visitors famous landscapes and landmarks of each country as if gazing through a train window as a local conductor would provide commentary. In each country the train would make “stops” at particular landmarks to focus on them.

Songs of Asia:

After being an observer of Asian and Asian American culture we wanted to create an experience where you could be a participant. We created a rhythm game where visitors play their drums together to match the drumming in songs that represented popular music genres from each country ranging from a Chinese lion dance to Korean kpop.

Each song also featured an animated music video that used historic and contemporary art to help visitors associate different cultural art styles with the country and music they were playing along to.

Each song was created by composing an accompanying midi file that would be converted to json to set the timings for notes to be spawned. This allowed us to control the complexity and difficulty of each level of the game without having to rely on the audio waveform to determine note timings.

Explorer Stations:

We created five mini museums that each featured a range of topics displayed in a unique way. We utilized shadow box collage with original art, audio panels that teach visitors pronuniciations of common words, and stereoscope holograms. 

Mist of Intentions:

As the last experience of the exhibit we wanted to create a place of contemplation and reflection. Inspired by the reflective mist water garden outside the space, we designed a transparent projection wall that would accumulate with the feelings, hopes, and anecdotes of the visitors on an existing glass wall.

In front of the wall were four kiosks that had visitors choose words from a list of values that best described them and then matched them with an Asia Society Game Changer who aligned most with their values. Visitors are then asked to respond to the prompt of day and their message joins the others on the wall. Visitors are then presented with a QR code with their typographic portrait, a video about their Game Changer, and further information about the Game Changer.

For visitors who aren’t at a kiosk, they can use their phone to scan a QR code featured in the room to make a mobile submission to the wall.

Partner Teams:

C&G Partners: