OSU150

A Legacy of Transformation

The OSU150 exhibit, marking Oregon State University’s 150th anniversary, stands as a dynamic chronicle of achievement. It’s a creative collaboration between AldrichPears Associates for exhibit design and Sticky for interactive development. This exhibit is a tribute to OSU’s enduring legacy of providing quality education, groundbreaking research, and dedicated community service. Celebrating these milestones, the exhibit serves as a source of inspiration for future generations, reflecting OSU’s commitment to progress and excellence.

Our Approach

In crafting the OSU150 exhibit, Sticky embraced a philosophy of collaborative design with stakeholders, ensuring our creations resonated with OSU’s historical and cultural tapestry. Our process, characterized by iterative prototyping and continuous feedback, allowed us to refine our interactive elements, ensuring they were both engaging and accessible, including essential features like closed captioning for all video content to cater to diverse visitor needs.

Features

Interactive Storytelling Table: A centerpiece experience, this table invites visitors to explore 150 significant stories from OSU’s history. Its multi-user interface, honed through extensive prototyping and stakeholder feedback, fosters an intuitive and collaborative user experience.

Whale-Tracking Research Station: Tailored for younger visitors, this station provided an engaging way to understand the impact of climate change on marine life. Kids used RFID-tagged whale models to simulate searching for krill, mirroring the research conducted by OSU scientists.

Multimedia Educational Elements: The exhibit also features a variety of interactive elements, including touchscreens explaining animation techniques, a musical coffee table that evokes memories of campus life, and a mystery audio station that connects the sounds of the environment to OSU’s history.

Impact

The OSU150 exhibit showcased OSU’s lasting legacy and its ongoing contributions, captivating a wide audience with its interactive and educational components. The centerpiece interactive table, now located at the OSU alumni center in downtown Portland, continues to play a vital role in educating and inspiring visitors about the university’s influential presence.

A hand touching a wall-mounted screen headed “Where do whales find food?”, showing an illustrated diagram of a whale’s feeding range.

A hand holding a grey humpback whale cut-out tagged “Kiki” up to a reader mounted on an exhibit panel.

Two children at a large touchscreen, one drawing an arc across it as part of an animation timing exercise.

An armchair beside a wooden coffee table inlaid with a row of orange touch buttons, one labelled “Carry Me Back”, on a brick floor.

Two children at an exhibit panel headed “Can you guess what makes the noise?”, one pressing an orange button beside a card about OSU’s O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory.