SarahJane
Hayward

is a [visual identity, 
data, ux/ui] designer


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Artifacts: Museum of Future Lost Objects
Web Design & 3D

Artifacts, Museum of Future Lost Objects is a virtual museum that seeks to document and preserve the memory of a disappearing natural world.

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Overview 

In the past forty years, earth has lost half of its wildlife (World Wildlife Fund). It is predicted that in the next eighty years, twenty-three percent of the earth’s natural habitats could be gone (World Economic Forum). While conserving healthy ecosystems and habitats is important, the specific problem I am tackling with my senior project is the documentation of natural entities before they become extinct.

Artifacts addresses this by displaying three-dimensional models of various plants, animals, and features of the landscape. The “artifacts” were all found and documented in the undeveloped wilderness of Southeast Alaska. These models allow users to interact with and learn about features of the natural world, even if they themselves are unable to visit and witness them first-hand. On the website, users are able to interact with the artifacts in a tactile way by zooming in, out, and rotating the models. This invites the user into a deeper exploration than a two-dimensional image permits, allowing for a more meaningful connection: between user and natural world, permanence and change, loss and discovery. 

Unlike a forest, what you put on the internet is forever, impermeable to the wear of time. I would like to harness this ability to make the mortal immortal, inspire a love of the natural world and what we still have, and write a letter to the future showing what we have lost.

One of the main inspirations behind this project is Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, and the lyric “they took all the trees and put them in a tree museum”. My senior project is my own version of Mitchell’s tree museum. 





Insights


Insights uses the concept of a fossil, a natural form of preservation, to create a data visualization that highlights the different ecological facets of an artifact. Each category has its own key dictating how a fossil face will be formed based off of the artifact’s features. The combination of these features creates a distinct fossil for each artifact.




Impressions


Below Insights, the user scrolls down to the next examination of the artifact called impressions.

Impressions follows the same visual concept as Insights, but examines each artifact through a more subjective and emotional lens. The interactive data visualization technique combines form and sound. A radial graph is created by the gravitational pull an artifact has towards the different subjective attributes.

The exact placement of the points in the radial graph are informed by a grid created using a musical composition chart, meaning that every data point is assigned a corresponding note. These notes, played in order counter clockwise, become the artifact’s own distinct melody. 

These melodies have been composed into ambient songs that play on the detail page of the associated artifact. 






Gallery

The gallery hosts every artifact that is part of the Ecotones exhibit for examination. The user is able to browse through the collection and read short descriptions about the artifact.



Rooms

Rooms are extensions of the Ecotones exhibit and contextualize the place and environment the artifacts naturally exist in. Users are invited to enter and explore rooms by hovering over different videos that reveal contextual information about the landscape. 






Modeling Process







Visual Identity


Sonic Branding