Creating an interactive and inclusive representation of the Portuguese language through a series of installations 

Initially hired to design one experience, my relationship with the Museum of Portuguese Language pushed me to form a small team that designed, coded and installed four additional installations.

Client: Fundação Roberto Marinho

My roles: Interaction Designer, Project Manager

The challenge

In 2015, a major fire broke out in Sao Paulo's iconic Museum of Portuguese Language. Following the tragic incident, the Roberto Marinho Foundation was assigned to rebuild the museum. They contacted me in 2018 to help redesign an installation called Crosswords.

Crosswords aimed to give visitors an experience of how other languages influenced Brazilian Portuguese. The successful delivery of the design for Crosswords sparked a relationship that inspired the client to trust me with developing four additional experiences.

I formed a small business under the name of feelScience, which addressed the client's needs and educated me about the challenges of running a remote team pre-pandemic. Beyond my design activities, I had to hire and manage developers, and digital producer, that supported feelScience's relationship with the client. It was also the first I worked with museum curators and anthropologists as stakeholders.

The outcome

The Museum of Portuguese Language reopened in August 2021 and received more the 260k visitors in its first year since reopening. The expectation is that four million visitors in visit the musuem over the next decade.

Crosswords

The first design for the Crosswords installation dated from 2007 and displayed the content in tab-like navigation, very common on websites at the time. My role was to update the experience with a more modern interaction model while maintaining accessibility. I worked on three new concepts to present to the museum's creative team. I used low-fidelity prototypes to show how the interaction would happen in each of the concepts.

The first concept displayed an animated flow of words on the screen. Despite using 2D elements, the animation would give a sense of depth and reflect the idea of abundance inherent to the Portuguese language.

The second proposal displayed the content in an Instagram-stories-like format. Words would appear in alphabetical order, with its related content animated every time a new term loads on the screen. This proposal had the most passive interaction model.

Inspired by the word game Hangman. First, the visitor sees the definition of the word and the relative term in its original language. Then, the user has to fill in the letters to discover the related word in Portuguese. Users could also choose the level of difficulty, and swipe randomly through the expressions.

The museum's creative team decided to go with the first interaction model. I worked on the final visual design which was approved by Studio  CLDT, responsible for the museum’s branding and visual identity.

The functional software was created as a serverless application, using Javascript, P5 and React libraries. I wanted to challenge myself on coding, and wrote the code for the word cloud animation. As the client decided to hire me for designing other experiences, I recruited developer Hugo Lucena to finalize the code. 

Screen recording of the functional software

Indigenous Languages in Brazil 

(Documentation in Progress)

Brazilian Portuguese Timeline

(Documentation in Progress)

Credits

(Documentation in Progress)

Credits

 cldt. (style guide), Museu da Língua Portuguesa (content), Hugo Lucena, Renata Gaui (developers), Carolina Matos (digital producer).

Date

2018 - 2021