We are Moonlanders, a team of graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center! For the Spring 2023 semester, we are excited to be working with the Moonshot Museum in Pittsburgh on prototyping different interactive experiences for their facilities.
Our team consists of:
- Angelina Shi – Producer
- Anthony (Anton) Renouf – Assistant Producer
- Tairan (Evans) Gao
- Tsai Yen (Cleo) Ko
- Derek Williams
- Caiyu (ZhouZhou) Zhang
Our Client
The Moonshot Museum is a newly opened space museum in Pittsburgh, PA, dedicated to encouraging everyone to find their place in space! The museum uses interactive experiences to increase children’s interest in STEM and to help children envision a future in the space industry.
The museum is located in the same building as Astrobotic, a company currently working on the Peregrine and Griffin lunar landers. Thus, one of the museum’s key attractions are the views into the clean room where Astrobotic employees are hard at work assembling the lunar landers.
For our Spring 2023 semester project, the Moonshot Museum has requested that we deliver three rapid prototypes with accompanying design documentation. Each prototype should be designed for a different area of the museum and help increase interactivity in their respective areas.
The three areas of interest that the client has identified are:
- The Theater
- The Clean Room
- The Art Zone
The team will visit the Moonshot Museum on January 23, 2023 in order to study the available space and technology in more detail. Afterwards, we should be well-equipped to begin researching and brainstorming potential designs.
Preparing for the Semester
Outside of our initial client meeting, our first week was primarily focused on preparing for the semester ahead. There were many administrative tasks that had to be handled before the end of the week. These included setting up our project room, deciding on producers, and choosing a team name.
We were also able to begin discussing what our vision and expectations are for the project. In particular, we had to create a composition box that detailed potential inspirations, needs, and experiences for our project. This composition box will be used next week on Monday, January 23, 2023, during the playtesting workshop.
As the team concludes Week 1, we are already looking ahead to Week 2. For Week 2, we hope to visit the Moonshot Museum and, thus, gain a better understanding of our project’s parameters especially in terms of available space and technology. From there, we will need to rapidly begin brainstorming potential design ideas in anticipation of 1/4s walkarounds in Week 3.