Revitalizing Mining Heritage Through Interactive Design

Evolving Web worked with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) to design and develop a kiosk for the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame exhibit. Located at the ROM, it displays curated information about the history of mining in Canada. It showcases the biographies and personal stories through a fully bilingual interactive video wall that explains how mining touches every part of our lives.

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is a museum of art, world culture and natural history in Toronto, Ontario. It is one of the largest museums in North America and Canada, attracting more than a million visitors yearly, making it the most-visited museum in Canada. The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame recognizes outstanding achievements in the mining industry, celebrates individual leadership and aims to inspire future generations in mining.

The goal of this project was to rebuild the exhibit’s interface from the ground up, replacing the legacy Flash-based interface. We wanted to completely modernize the design and implement a CMS to make it easy to update the content and interactive features with little or no technical maintenance.

Our team designed and developed an interactive bilingual kiosk that is played in exhibition spaces at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and select venues across Canada.

Our work included:

• Design of an interactive interface that’s optimized for the kiosk: a touchscreen that visitors interact with and a projector on a wall, requiring that content be full-screen, and limiting scrolling to navigation controls
• Selecting a colour palette that matches the exhibit space and emphasis on Gold as a key brand color as well as an important mineral for the Canadian mining industry 
• Building a WordPress-based CMS for easy updates to content, media management, and adding new inductees on an on-going basis
• High-contrast, accessible design that’s optimized for diverse audiences: the navigation is located at the bottom of the interface and click features are deliberately minimized to eliminate usability concerns
• Design that leverages geometric and structural aspects of the Mining Hall of Fame logo and a historical yearbook feeling
• Integration of videos that are hosted remotely on Vimeo, while hiding the Vimeo brand so that the video content is front-and-center
• A map-enabled search interface that allows users to explore the facts, locations, and historical information about mining from across Canada
• Filters to find content by location and significant historical figures
• Automatic migration of 90 locations and over 200 inductees to the CMS
• Adapting the kiosk website to be available online
• Leveraging Isotope.js for automatic layouts, simplifying the front-end development and ensuring that the content adapts to the kiosk’s dimensions

The interactive kiosk at the Royal Ontario Museum has transformed the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame exhibit, providing an engaging and informative experience for visitors. With a modernized interface and user-friendly CMS, museum staff can now effortlessly update the bilingual content, ensuring the exhibit remains current and relevant.

The interactive map and video integrations contribute to a rich visitor experience, allowing them to explore mining history across Canada in an intuitive way. The adaptable architecture makes the kiosk a sustainable, low-maintenance, and cost-effective solution, enabling long-term scalability for use in other museums and institutions nationwide.