Engineering in a River System

A river that runs through a city is full of trade-offs. The Museum of Science, Boston, wanted visitors to make those trade-offs with their own hands and see what happens.

The challenge

The Yawkey Gallery on the Charles River is the museum's most central permanent exhibition, looking out on the river itself. For its centerpiece, the exhibit team planned a 24-foot table with five stations about dams, fish ladders, pesticides, runoff, and sewer overflow.

Visitors needed to change something physical and see the river respond right away. And because it's a permanent exhibit, it had to hold up to years of everyday use.

What we built

Working with the museum's exhibit developers and fabricators, we built the table's interactive layer. Animations are projected onto the sculpted surface, lined up with projection mapping and alignment tools we wrote for it.

At each station, visitors place 3D-printed pieces: a dam, a fish ladder, a pipe to the treatment plant. Every piece has an RFID tag inside, and Arduino microcontrollers detect when it goes in. The Unity software plays out what happens next. Put in a dam and the fish can't get upstream. Add a fish ladder and they can.

The result

Engineering in a River System won a Bronze MUSE Award in the Interactive Kiosks category from the American Alliance of Museums in 2017. It's part of the Yawkey Gallery on the Charles River, which opened in March 2016.