Coral reefs, covering 1% of the ocean but supporting 25% of marine life, are threatened by evolving climate factors

“

- Sanctuary

Brief

My Input

Sanctuary is an installation project that I did in a group while studying at MDS. It’s all about bringing awareness to coral aquaculture by allowing users to go through an interactive simplified process of coral restoration and viewing their live impact through a “digital reef”.

This project was mainly a fully-fledged installation using processes from UX/UI, so I learned a lot about UX/UI development from my teammates. Since the installation blends digital and physical elements together, I was mainly tasked with focusing on the digital and visual aspects of the project such as branding, posters, and other visual collateral.

Main Concepts

Winning Silver in both Digital Design and Social Good categories for Best Awards 2024, Sanctuary offers a modern installation experience like no other. Through the use of interactive touch points throughout the entire installation, users become their very own coral gardener, undergoing the narrative process of “gather, nurture, restore, influence”.

The Sanctuary consists of a physical interface that allows users to create their own coral, a hologram to display the user’s created coral, lights that react with user’s interactions, a custom evolving soundscape - engineered by me, eco-friendly faux coral, and other design collateral such as a fully-fledged creative media strategy.

OUTCOMES

Logo

Through a serif font, topographic background, and luminescent highlighting colours, the Sanctuary logo represents the flow and comforting feeling of both coral and the ocean.

The topographic background also represents the installation itself as the installation has the layout of a topographic map.

01.

* Assisted by Ben Walsham

Narrative Posters

The narrative posters are placed outside the installation, showing users the process of Sanctuary and how they can interact with it.

The posters focus more on easily-understandable images rather than mass amounts of text, allowing users to easily understand the process at a glance and therefore not overwhelming people.

02.

* Assisted by Calum De Fanti, Ben Walsham, Monica Luu

Influence

The influence section of the process shows a digital display of live data from the Sanctuary.

Anytime a user interacts with the installation and places their nurtured coral into the digital reef, they can see the impact of their newly nurtured coral and how they helped to positively affect the digital reef.

This experience mimics that of real coral aquaculture restoration and gets users to think about how this impact could truly affect the real coral reefs in our world.

03.