master's project

Designing a life-size holographic storytelling kiosk to preserve and share Indigenous cultural knowledge with the First Nation of Nacho Nyak Dun.

problem

Indigenous oral histories and languages are at risk. For the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun in Mayo, Yukon, the Northern Tutchone language and its oral traditions are central to cultural identity and community wellbeing, but conventional digital archives fail to capture what makes oral knowledge powerful: presence, relationship, and the feeling of being spoken to directly. Static recordings preserve the words but strip away the act of storytelling. They cannot engage with a child's curiosity or convey the weight of a storyteller's physical presence.

solution

We adapted the HoloBox, a life-size holographic display originally built for conferences, into a cultural knowledge kiosk co-designed with NND community members. The system presents oral histories, language lessons, craft demonstrations, and 3D representations of cultural belongings, delivered by community elders at human scale. During the community evaluation in Mayo, participants described the experience as feeling like being told a story, not watching a screen. That distinction is the core contribution: the life-size, spatially immediate format carries forward some of the relational quality of oral knowledge in ways that flat-screen formats cannot.

Process

The project started with a question the community had already been sitting with for a long time: how do you keep a language alive when the people who speak it fluently are getting older, and the tools available for preservation were built by and for institutions rather than communities?

The HoloBox was not an obvious answer. It was originally designed for conference telepresence, a way to beam a speaker into a room from somewhere else. But something about the format felt promising. Life-size. Direct. The sense of being addressed by a person rather than watching content on a screen. That quality, if it could be harnessed, pointed toward something closer to how oral knowledge actually moves between people.

Design Challenges

Designing for a life-size holographic display introduced constraints I hadn't encountered before. Every interactive element had to land at eye level, not metaphorically, but literally, for a projection the size of a person. And unlike most interfaces, this one carried cultural weight. Every decision about what to show, how to label it, and what to prioritize had to be legible not just to a user, but to a community.

Iterations

I built in Figma. I brought it back. It changed. I built again. The community's feedback wasn't a checkpoint at the end of the process, it was the process. Each round of iteration tightened the gap between what I assumed would work and what actually felt right to the people it was for.

Design 1

The first design was clean, functional, and wrong. White backgrounds, green buttons, rectangular photo cards, it worked as an interface, but it could have been any app for any purpose. The visual language was mine, not theirs. The Elders appeared in cropped portrait frames like profile pictures. The craft categories looked like an e-commerce catalogue. It was legible. It was generic.

Design 2

The second design started from a different question entirely: what does this community's visual world actually look like? The answer changed everything. The burgundy and amber palette drew from the warmth of the community's existing materials. Elder portraits moved into circular frames with decorative beadwork-inspired borders, a deliberate echo of cultural craft traditions rather than a UI convention. The warm gradients replaced clinical white. The whole experience started to feel like it belonged somewhere specific.

Design Demo

September 30th, 2025

The demo in Mayo, Yukon was where the design met reality. Watching community members interact with the HoloBox for the first time told me things no workshop could (where people hesitated and what drew them in).

Main Takeaways:

The design assumed one person standing alone. The community arrived together. That gap between how I imagined the interaction and how it actually happened told me more than any user interview could.
The environment told me something too. Ambient light, noise, and a crowd of people pushed the holographic illusion to its limits. Some things a designer controls. Some things belong to the room, and the design has to survive both.

What's next?

The holobox is evolving into a collaborative platform. The next iteration will enable consensus-based group interaction using mobile devices as controllers, allowing multiple people to simultaneously explore and select cultural content together on the holographic display.

This multi-modal approach (combining the holobox's central visual space with personal mobile devices) better reflects NND's communal decision-making traditions. Rather than a single user controlling the experience, groups can discuss and collectively choose which cultural materials to view, supporting the social nature of knowledge transmission.

This direction builds on comparative research testing different group coordination methods around shared displays. Early findings suggest consensus-based interaction promotes more equitable participation, making it ideal for community-centered cultural applications where every voice matters.

The goal: technology that doesn't just display culture, but facilitates cultural practice.

year

ongoing

timeframe

2 years

tools

Figma, Photoshop