Shared History
The Shared History Project seeks to make history globally accessible and relevant to today’s audiences, focusing on 1300 years of Jewish life in German-speaking lands. Over the course of a year, the project featured weekly releases of historically significant objects in both 2D and virtual formats, enhancing educational and intercultural engagement.
Design Director
2021
The project's logo—a two-dimensional frame symbolizing the projection of time and our framed perceptions of it—serves as the cornerstone of its visual language. This conceptual approach extends to the UX information architecture, where timelines, maps, lists, epochs, and themes evolve with each weekly object release, forging new links to previous releases. By offering users various paths of discovery, the project facilitates opportunities to recontextualize existing beliefs.
Complimentary to the 2D web experience, the project offered a full virtual museum space, accessible on a broad array of devices, from desktops to VR headsets. The VR environment continued the frame metaphor with a meticulously designed metallic tube system which was both aesthetic and functional. This monoline tubing facilitated wayfinding, helping users navigate the timeline within the virtual space, and separately functioned as pedestals for artifacts and gateways to immersive historical scenes.
Responding to the virtual museum’s success and the demand for a physical presence, we created a traveling exhibition with 12 modular panels. The same methodology applied throughout the project presented an elegant solution, simple modular frames able to hold the canvas print and also collapse and stack into rolling container allowed the exhibit to travel great distances to publicly funded institutions. These frames, adaptable to various spaces and complete with configuration manual, extended the project's reach, furthering the mission to raise awareness of the shared histories of diverse cultures.
The Shared History Project not only succeeded in making history accessible and relevant but also demonstrated the power of combining traditional and cutting-edge technologies to foster a deeper understanding of our shared past.
