Des Moines Children's Museum
Interactive exhibits
What it is
The museum needed exhibits that actually work:
- a phone system kids can talk to each other on
- a fire house where aiming a water turret registers a hit
- a construction house where kids route pipes through a wall
Kids break things. Exhibits run all day for years with no engineer on site. If something is confusing, a six year old walks away in ten seconds.
Why early proofs mattered
Cutting PVC, ordering sensors, fabricating enclosures, and painting millwork costs real money and is hard to undo. The museum needed to know an exhibit would be fun and would work before committing materials.
A drawing cannot tell you whether a pipe puzzle is enjoyable, whether a wall layout is solvable, or how busy the lighting gets with several kids on it.
What we proved early
Pipe Puzzle Designer. A browser model of the construction house wall: try it. The museum can open it, try layouts, invent routes, watch spills, and see whether a configuration works. No install. No account. Design talks moved from opinions about a drawing to reactions to something just played. Cost of being wrong: a browser refresh.
Fire House hit detection. Miss-left, hit, and miss-right on the museum's water turret prototype, so the interaction could be tested for real. Function first. Appearance stays with the museum.
Phone stations ready for experience check before finish work. Confirm how the phones feel before irreversible paint and millwork.
What I owned
- Exhibit options and recommendations for scope, budget, and sequencing
- Phone system end to end: design, control software, multi-station audio, build guides, enclosure and faceplate layout, wiring harness, provisioning, test runbooks
- Fire House sensing on the water turret prototype
- Construction House Phase 1 plumbing proposal, plus the browser design tool
- Delivery management: sequencing, risk notes, hardware purchasing, expense tracking, status the museum can circulate
I covered single-board computers, multi-station audio, sensors, enclosure and harness work for public installs, interactive design for non-readers, and the client-facing writing that keeps a build moving.
What the museum keeps
The design tool for future layouts. Build guides, enclosure and harness specs, and the setup and troubleshooting runbooks so staff can provision, test, and repair stations. Fabrication, paint, and finish stay in-house.
If you are circling a build like this, email me.