Pjila'si

01 — Overview

Static exhibits preserve. Interactive ones invite.

The distinction sounds simple — but replacing a 50-year-old institutional showcase with an experience built by the community it was meant to represent is anything but. The Museum of Natural History in Halifax had a Mi'kmaw exhibit dating back to the 1960s. The community's own assessment: it was cold, object-focused, and failed to represent a living people. Pjila'si was the chance to start over — a new permanent exhibit developed with the Mi'kmaw community from the ground up.

The Mi'kmaw Advisory Group guided every step: selecting cultural belongings, shaping the stories, deciding what gets said and how. IX Labs' role was to bring that content to life through technology — not to interpret it. That meant working in close relationship with Mi'kmaw artists, storytellers, and cultural advisors throughout — extracting and curating content collaboratively, then returning every design decision for approval to ensure the message was accurate, consistent, and theirs.

The result is an 11-exhibit system spanning language, storytelling, geography, history, traditional knowledge, and contemporary Mi'kmaw life — designed not just for a single visit, but for repeat encounters. Different layers reveal themselves over time.

02 — My Role

Core designer on the digital side.

I was the lead UX/UI Designer at IX Labs, responsible for the digital experience across all eleven exhibits. IX Labs handled the interactive and digital layer; Panther Creative built the physical structures. My work sat at the intersection — designing experiences that depended on both, and adapting when the two sides didn't align.

The core challenge of the role wasn't the design itself — it was that creative control was distributed. Cultural content was being produced by Mi'kmaw artists, animators, storytellers, and community advisors on their own timelines. As an outsider to the culture, I couldn't make calls on that content — every ambiguous decision had to go back to the community for context. That meant building interaction frameworks first, then adapting when content arrived — sometimes in a different format, at a different quality, or later than expected.

When a video came back with a subject wearing green against a green-screen background, I flagged it for a reshoot. When audio didn't meet standard, I escalated to the audio engineer. When Exhibit 3.3's content came back in landscape when the physical installation needed portrait, I designed a Ken Burns approach to make the format work — and got it approved. That kind of reactive problem-solving was as much a part of the role as the original design work.

The cross-team structure also required active management. Bi-weekly PM calls between IX Labs and Panther weren't enough — by the time issues surfaced, both teams had already moved on. I set up a shared folder for live design and layout updates, and started inviting Panther's PM into my design meetings directly, so the fabrication team knew what was coming before it became a conflict.

03 — The Experience

Eleven exhibits. One experience system.

Mi'kmaw culture is primarily oral. Knowledge passes through storytelling, not writing — and most of what exists in the written or visual record is incomplete, filtered through a colonial lens. That reality shaped every design decision in Pjila'si: audio over text, human voice over institutional copy, interaction over passive reading. Technology wasn't the point. It was the means of making a living culture feel alive.

Each exhibit uses a different interaction model by design — touch, presence, physical buttons, audio narrative, projection. No two are the same. The variety keeps the space surprising across a full visit and ensures visitors who engage differently always find a way in.

Design spotlight — Exhibit 1.3: Mi'kmaw Cultural Landscape · 65" 4K Touch Screen · Interactive Map

The brief was to design an interactive map of Mi'kma'ki — the traditional Mi'kmaw territory — where visitors could explore place names in Mi'kmaw. Mi'kmaw place names are verb-based and descriptive. They paint a picture of the land through language, change by season, and are almost never named after a person. The challenge was making that logic legible to a general audience on a 65" screen, without flattening it.

Accessibility shaped the layout from the start. Museum exhibits must accommodate visitors of all abilities — which meant all touch interactions and on-screen buttons had to be positioned low enough for wheelchair users, children, and visitors who couldn't reach the top of a large display. That constraint influenced the entire layout hierarchy.

The harder problem was colour. My initial instinct was to use colour to differentiate regions on the map — standard cartographic thinking. The Mi'kmaw Advisory Group flagged it immediately: colouring regions differently would imply distinct tribal territories, which carried political meaning the community had not agreed to. The solution was to strip the map back to a monochromatic palette, removing any implied division, and let the images carry the saturation instead. The photographs became the focal points — their colour naturally drawing the eye against the neutral map background, while the map itself remained culturally neutral.

Design spotlight — Exhibit 2.2: How to Speak Mi'kmaw · 43" Touch Screen · 20-Button Nexmosphere Module · Language Station

Inspired by the Speak & Spell toy from the 1980s — visitors press physical buttons to hear individual Mi'kmaw sounds, then hear how they combine into words and phrases. The content was developed with a Mi'kmaw language specialist, covering phonetic structures that make Mi'kmaw distinct: the shwa vowel, the absence of a hard "r" sound, sounds with no English equivalent.

The UX challenge was attention management at scale. The station is large — and when a visitor is standing close to a 43" screen, looking left and right to cross-reference the word list with the buttons below is genuinely tiring. The initial layout put the word list on the right side of the screen, which meant constant head movement during the interaction.

The solution was progressive disclosure: the word list stays on the right at the start, giving visitors time to read and choose. Once they press their first button, the possible words shift to the bottom of the screen — within sightline of the buttons, keeping focus contained to a single area. The interaction becomes more natural, more like typing than reading. Visitors could explore spelling Mi'kmaw words without constantly breaking their attention.

Designing for large-format screens presents a constraint most digital designers don't encounter: the hardware often isn't available until close to installation. My workaround was using a projector to test interactions and scale at the correct size before the physical unit arrived — catching layout and legibility issues that would never surface on a laptop screen.

Design spotlight — Exhibit 2.3: Mi'kmaw Phonetics · Dual Projection · Proximity Sensor · Directional Speakers

The concept was a two-screen projection experience arranged in a V-shape: the right screen showing a Mi'kmaw language specialist speaking directly to the visitor, the left screen showing animated graphics that illustrated the concepts being taught — like a lecture paired with a visual explainer. I designed the concept and structure, sketched the initial layouts with input from the community and a team member, then handed off to the animator to produce.

The physical execution required material testing. Short-throw projectors would be used — but scrim material and projection angle both affect visibility in ways that can't be confirmed on screen. We tested different scrim materials to validate visibility and found that tension mattered: a poorly tensioned scrim would distort the video. The testing also determined the exact video ratio needed for the angled surface, which fed directly back into the production specs for the animator.

Directional speakers were used instead of open audio — sound that only reaches a visitor standing in the correct position, rather than bleeding into the rest of the exhibit. Combined with the proximity sensor, the experience only activates when someone is actually there. Visitors become active participants rather than spectators walking past a looping screen.

The remaining eight exhibits

04 — Design Decisions

Principles that held across every exhibit.

Audio over text — because the culture is oral

Mi'kmaw knowledge passes through storytelling, not writing. Most of what exists in the written record is incomplete or filtered through a colonial lens. That's not a gap to work around — it's a design constraint to design from. Nearly every exhibit in Pjila'si leads with audio, human voice, and spoken narrative rather than text panels. The medium matches the culture.

Human voice over institutional voice

Nothing in the experience should sound like a museum. Every piece of content was shaped by the Mi'kmaw Advisory Group — the audio, the narrative framing, the stories chosen. The design's job was to hold the space for that voice, not to mediate it. When the community spoke, the design stepped back.

Designed for return visits

One-time exhibitions lose their reason to exist after a school trip. Pjila'si was designed to reward return visitors — content across several exhibits built to be seasonally updated with different recordings and stories. Visitors who come back will find something new.

A system of different interactions

Each exhibit uses a different interaction model by design. Touch, presence, buttons, audio, projection — no two are the same. The variety keeps the space surprising across a full visit, and ensures visitors who engage differently — children, adults, hesitant visitors — always find a way in.

Physical reflection that stays

The paper takeaway in the Storytelling exhibit was the most unusual decision. Visitors write something and leave it behind. The goal: shift from passive consumption to active connection — not "what did you learn?" but "how does this connect to your own life?" The box fills over time, becoming part of the exhibit itself.

05 — Challenges

Red tape, content dependencies, and cultural trust.

Working with a living Indigenous community on a cultural exhibit is not the same as designing for a brief. The Mi'kmaw community had every reason to be protective — and that protection came in the form of processes: approvals, reviews, and filming restrictions that were non-negotiable. Sourcing the right person from the community, working around availability, navigating who had the authority to approve specific content — these weren't bureaucratic inconveniences. They were the work.

As an outsider to the culture, I couldn't make judgment calls on cultural content when the context wasn't clear. Every ambiguous decision had to go back to the community. That meant timelines slipped, content arrived late, and the design had to be built to accommodate that uncertainty — frameworks that could receive content when it was ready, rather than structures that broke without it.

The cross-team structure added a second layer of complexity. IX Labs handled digital; Panther handled fabrication. When content format or layout decisions were made by one team without the other's input — as happened with Exhibit 3.3 — it created conflicts that required creative problem-solving under pressure. The shared folder and integrated design reviews I set up weren't process improvements for their own sake. They were a direct response to what broke.

06 — Outcomes

Opened March 7, 2025. Covered nationally.

Pjila'si opened on March 7, 2025 at the Museum of Natural History in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The opening was covered by CBC, CTV, and Global News — and drew responses from the Mi'kmaw Advisory Group, the Nova Scotia Museum, and the federal Minister of Canadian Heritage.

07 — Reflection

Retrospective

Pjila'si was unlike any project I'd worked on before — not because of the scale or the technology, but because of what design meant in that context. The work was never just about interaction models or screen layouts. It was about who gets to tell a story, and how design either serves or interferes with that.

The most important skill on this project wasn't design skill. It was knowing when to push and when to step back. The map's colour palette changed because I listened. The creation story kept its violence because the community held firm and I understood why. The best moments in Pjila'si came from the space between what I designed and what the community brought — neither one alone would have been enough.

I also came away with a much clearer understanding of what cross-discipline coordination actually requires. Two teams with different languages, different rhythms, and different definitions of "done" will find the gap between them — the only question is whether you've made that gap visible before or after something breaks. On this project, I learned to make it visible first.