The Penguin Academy kiosks at Living Coasts allow users to choose their own penguin to nurture, grow and teach skills to survive in the wild. Users learn through play about a penguins’ lifecycle of feeding, breeding and evading predators. Penguin fanatics can also play online, but can only get to a certain level of the game before they have to visit the Living Coasts attraction and enter a secret code to unlock the final levels.

“We really had a fantastic experience with HMC, the whole purpose was to come up with a concept that was lively, interactive, but that also taught our visitors about marine pollution issues and they’ve really managed to do that for us!” Elaine Lambert — Director, Living Coasts

Dwell time at Living Coasts has dramatically increased in the area at Living Coasts in which the Penguin Academy is situated. Hundreds of penguins are still competing for top spot on the leaderboards.

I also setup a Facebook page for one of Living Coasts’ penguins to support the online games. Bizarrely (I guess everyone wants to be friends with a Penguin) Ping at Living Coasts now has over has 1,000 friends on the account. Living Coasts use the Facebook site in a very clever way; telling people about special offers, inviting people to events and telling stories about how the other penguins are getting on.

Role
Project management, UX, Design, Development, Install

Length
3 months. Completed in 2008

Team size
Creative Director, Project manager, 2xDesigners, UX, 2xDevelopers, 2xInstall crew

Deliverable
3xKiosks, Web games, Facebook site

Design process
Interaction audit, concepting, UX and visual design, user testing, design refinements