Inspiring Local Champions

Overview

A lobby with no story. A city with a legacy worth telling.

The City of Port Coquitlam commissioned a redesign of an underused lobby and hallway in a local community centre — timed to celebrate the Terry Fox Run. The brief centred on Terry Fox's story not as a monument, but as a lens: a way to reframe what it means to be a champion. The guiding idea was that anyone can be a champion, and being one doesn't mean always being the best.

Working within a multidisciplinary team, I led all design across the project — UX, UI, and game design — while the broader team handled development, fabrication, and installation. The outcome was three connected exhibits: a physical timeline wall tracing 10 pivotal moments in Terry Fox's early life, an AI-powered touchscreen experience called My Champion that visualised each visitor's personal idea of a champion, and a full overhaul of the city's Hall of Fame — bringing local athletic legacy up to date and making it accessible to a new generation of young athletes.

The Problem

One game that had never been built before. Two exhibits that needed rescuing.

The space was a blank slate — a lobby and hallway with no identity. Each exhibit brought its own challenge, but My Champion was the one with no precedent to work from.

My Champion — Making it feel personal, not like a form

The brief called for an avatar creator where visitors could build characters embodying the qualities of a champion. The design problem wasn't the concept — it was the execution. An avatar picker that lets you select "hard-working" and "team player" from a list is technically on-brief. But it doesn't feel personal. The challenge was designing an experience where every choice a visitor made actually reflected something about them, so the champion they built felt like theirs.

The other two exhibits each arrived with a different kind of constraint. The Hall of Fame ran on legacy software that couldn't be maintained or updated — it needed a full redevelopment and a content model that staff could manage going forward. The Timeline Wall had no touchscreen: visitors interact through physical proximity and screen movement, which meant the design had to communicate its own affordances without any instruction, while blending a digital screen seamlessly into a printed physical backdrop.

Research & Discovery

From a fabricator's guidelines to a cohesive design brief

My Champion was the only exhibit that required primary research — and it shaped most of what we learned about the audience. Before a single screen was designed, we ran user interviews and questionnaires to test which animation styles resonated, and put early gameplay prototypes in front of kids directly to validate the interaction model. The other two exhibits were informed by internal research: auditing the existing Hall of Fame content, mapping data structures, and reviewing the physical space with the fabrication team.

The project ran across a structured discovery and kick-off phase, followed by milestone-based sprints. Monthly check-ins with City of Port Coquitlam staff kept the work aligned to client expectations, while biweekly syncs with the fabrication team grounded design decisions in what the space could actually support.

Design Process

Designing a game that had never existed before.

The project ran in milestone-based sprints across roughly 15 months, with monthly check-ins with the City of Port Coquitlam and biweekly syncs with the fabrication team. Each exhibit had its own design track, but decisions made in one consistently affected the others — so the work was never fully sequential.

My Champion

The brief for My Champion was clear on the destination: an open-ended avatar creator where visitors could build inspirational characters embodying the qualities of a champion — replayable, and shareable between families and friends. What it left open was the path. The design challenge wasn't redefining the brief; it was figuring out how to make it feel genuine. An avatar picker that lets you select "hard-working" and "team player" from a list is technically on-brief. But it doesn't feel personal — it feels like a form. The work was designing an experience where every choice a visitor made actually reflected something about them, so the champion they built felt like theirs, not like a preset.

We evaluated three interaction directions with the client: a traditional quiz format, a blended concept, and a video game-style GUI. Client feedback pushed toward a hybrid — swiping-based and visually driven, where each answer felt like a decision rather than a form field. A firm constraint shaped how far the question arc could go: five questions, maximum. We explored both fewer and more — neither changed the experience enough to justify the tradeoff. User testing and time constraints validated five as the right number, and keeping it compact mattered for another reason: the experience included a review step where visitors could revisit their answers before generating their champion. That added dwell time, which meant the question arc itself had to stay tight. Five questions also gave visitors room to go back and change an answer without feeling like they'd lost significant progress.

The first version of the question arc put the most abstract concepts at the front — what values define a champion? What does confidence look like? It didn't land. Abstract questions without a visual anchor are hard to engage with, particularly for kids. The breakthrough was inverting the order: lead with visual direction, then move into personality traits and values. Giving visitors something to see and choose early — a character already starting to feel like theirs — made the harder, more abstract questions easier to engage with. Visual anchor first, meaning second.

The unisex constraint drove a more elegant solution than any gender question could have. Rather than asking visitors to identify or describe themselves, the system generates a random androgynous character at the start of each session — visitors choose the one that appeals to them, not necessarily the one that looks like them. The logic is borrowed from video games: the avatar is a representation of you, not you. That framing removed gender entirely as a topic, kept the experience sensitive to identity without making it an explicit question, and gave visitors a moment of genuine choice early in the session. When users make a meaningful choice, they build a stronger connection to the character that follows — which is why that moment of selection mattered beyond just aesthetics. We evaluated four visual styles to find the one that could carry that weight: illustrated 2D, anime-influenced, semi-realistic, and Pixar-style 3D. Anime didn't survive the androgyny test — the style's conventions tend to resolve a gender read regardless of intent. Semi-realistic added production complexity the team couldn't support. Pixar-influenced 3D cleared every bar: warm, playful, inclusive, and flexible enough to support the full range of skin tones and styles required.

Midway through the project we ran a structured focus group with kids to test early character design directions and a live prototype of the interaction model. One finding shifted specific decisions: kids responded less to polished character art than expected, and more to the feeling of agency — whether choices felt genuinely theirs, not like selections from a constrained menu. That pushed us to increase variety in the randomised character base and revisit several question prompts that had been reading as too prescriptive. A secondary finding was that younger visitors navigated the swipe interaction instinctively, while older visitors hesitated — which told us the affordance signalling in the idle state needed to work harder before anyone touched the screen.

The hardest challenge in the project was making the content and model work together reliably at scale. My Champion runs on a local LORA model — a fine-tuned AI running entirely on-premise — to generate the champion avatar and voice based on user selections. Without a keyboard for input, the experience had to rely entirely on pre-built content: a champion database diverse and specific enough that every pathway through it felt unique, not generic. That required significant work to map user interests, diverse career paths, and personality traits in a way that could scale across thousands of sessions without producing the same result twice. The architecture behind it is a content decision tree — diagrams mapping every question pathway, every answer combination, and the model inputs needed to produce the right output. Personality answers didn't just influence the Champion Voice quote: they shaped the character's face, determined the statistics printed on the back of the sports card, and surfaced specific suggestions for where those traits could grow. The card is a personalised output grounded in the visitor's answers, with a moment of reflection built in. The personality framework was abstracted from established personality type research and studies — giving the model a scientific foundation even if visitors never see it.

Terry Fox's role in the experience required its own iteration. An early version wove a narrative around each question — his story running alongside the visitor's choices as a kind of guide. It broke the illusion: the narrative was always the same regardless of what the user chose, which directly undermined the feeling of going your own direction. The principle that surfaced from cutting it: competing narratives dilute agency. The solution was lighter — a Did You Know card on every screen, showing how Terry Fox would answer the same question or idea. His story alongside theirs, not instead of it.

The final output format went through its own exploration. Multiple directions were considered before it became clear that cards were the right answer. Kids love cards — as game mechanics, as collectibles, as things worth showing to a friend. Sports was already the language of this community centre. A sports card wasn't imposed on the experience. It belonged there.

Hall of Fame

The Hall of Fame was a rescue operation more than a redesign. The existing system mixed athletes, coaches, and rising stars with no clear hierarchy, living in a WordPress setup that could no longer be maintained. The work was establishing a content model flexible enough to grow — athlete profiles, trivia, award nominations — while navigating inconsistent records and decades of photography with incompatible aspect ratios.

Timeline Wall

The Timeline Wall had no touchscreen — visitors move through it via physical proximity and screen movement. That meant teaching visitors how to interact without any instruction, while blending a 52" digital screen into a printed physical backdrop. Hardware wasn't always available to test at scale, which introduced calibration and scale-perception variables that only fully resolved on site.

The Solution

My Champion — and the two exhibits built around it.

My Champion

I owned My Champion end-to-end: concept, interaction logic, content, visual design, AI training, and user testing. The only thing I didn't build was the code. I conceived the game model, authored the full question logic and content, defined the look and feel, helped train the AI model on appropriate content, and ran user testing to validate the experience before it went into production.

Visitors are greeted by a splash screen designed to pull them in, then invited to choose from a randomised androgynous character base — skin tone and style varied on each playthrough. From there, a question arc guides them through three phases. The first — personal filters — establishes context: what do you care about, what world do you move through? The second surfaces values: how do you work, how do you treat people, what do you prioritise when it counts? The third, Champion Voice, is where the experience earns its emotional payoff — a motivational quote attributed to a real champion whose qualities mirror the answers given. Not a generic affirmation, but something that feels chosen specifically for you. The logic threading these phases together is a correlation model built on personality frameworks, designed to produce a meaningful match rather than a random output.

Behind the experience is a locally trained AI model running entirely on-premise — no cloud, no external calls. Every champion avatar and voice is generated from a content decision tree that maps the visitor's five answers to the correct model inputs, producing a result that feels personal because it's built from their specific path. The experience works offline, visitor data never leaves the kiosk, and the output stays consistent and safe for a youth audience. The model, the content, and the card output are all connected — a system that only works when every layer is tuned together.

The champion card was the payoff moment — the instant the abstract questions collapsed into something personal and worth keeping. Structurally it draws from sports cards — deliberately — with a nod to Pokémon in the flip mechanic and the collect-and-replay incentive. The front carries the generated avatar, name, and a tagline drawn from the Champion Voice. The back shows the champion stats built from the question answers. The reveal is staged: a loading screen runs first, long enough to feel earned without losing a kid's attention, then the card flips into view. Every 1-in-100 cards is holographic — a decision made entirely for delight. It's not communicated in advance. It just happens. The last five generated cards are displayed at the start of each session — a solution to a brief requirement and a practical problem at once. The brief asked for an experience families could share and compare without needing to download anything or photograph a screen. A large display of cards they can browse, point at, and play with solves that. User testing showed kids genuinely enjoyed looking at other people's cards — reading their stats, comparing their champions, getting curious about what their own would look like. At the start of a session, that becomes an attractor state: it draws kids in and builds investment before they've answered a single question. It also avoided the alternative — a looping idle animation — which in a community centre setting risks becoming a distraction for people walking past or watching from the sidelines rather than a draw for the people it's meant to serve.

Timeline Wall

On the Timeline Wall I owned interaction planning, animations, and layout — the dev team handled implementation. The experience centres on a 52" screen against a printed physical backdrop: visitors push or pull horizontally across 10 pivotal moments in Terry Fox's early life, with an opening animation I designed demonstrating the gesture before anyone needs to touch it. Stopping on a moment opens a content panel with story and context. The physical wall carries the full narrative; the digital layer rewards the visitors who pause to explore it.

Hall of Fame

On the Hall of Fame I owned the full UX and UI — expanding the brief beyond a static gallery into a community portal connecting visitors to the clubs and programs active in Port Coquitlam today. The result is a card-based experience across four sections: Champions, Builders, Awards, and Get Involved. A trivia section, persistent navigation, and a new CMS that lets any staff member update content without developer involvement round out an exhibit built to grow long after launch.

Outcomes

A lobby that now has something to say.

The exhibit opened in April 2025 to an overwhelmingly positive response from the community, the City, and the Sports Alliance. What had been an underused hallway became a destination — a space that gave young people in Port Coquitlam a reason to stop, interact, and see themselves as champions.

The project was nominated for Heritage BC's 2026 People's Choice Award — winner to be announced May 2026. It was also featured on CTV News Vancouver at launch.

Reflection

Retrospective

The backend architecture of My Champion is the thing I'd revisit first. Building a system that correlates personality types to champion traits added real depth to the experience — but it also meant a significant investment of time in understanding personality frameworks and threading them into an interaction that needed to feel effortless. In hindsight, I'd simplify the correlation model early and protect that complexity budget for the parts of the experience visitors actually feel.

Training the AI model took longer than expected, and the sticking point was an assumption that turned out to be wrong. The written content from the experience — question copy, champion descriptions, values language — felt like a natural training source. It wasn't. Raw copy produced unpredictable output: the model would drift, hallucinate phrasing, or produce text that was technically coherent but tonally off for a community centre audience. The solution was a fixed two-sentence template with dynamically swapped placeholder keywords, driven by the user's selections. Constrain the input format, vary only the key words, and the output becomes consistent and safe. Predictable input, predictable output — a simple principle that took real iteration to find.

The Timeline Wall taught me something about hardware dependency. Designing a digital screen that needs to blend seamlessly with a printed physical background is a different kind of problem when you can't test against the actual hardware at full scale. A test environment at smaller scale can get you far, but it introduces variables — colour calibration, motion response, scale perception — that only surface at size. In future projects I'd push harder, earlier, to lock down hardware so a physical prototype can be in front of the client before the design is too far along to course-correct.