Museums • History • First Nations

Īpipiri map table

Client

Location

Completed

Russell Museum

Russell, Aotearoa New Zealand

2019

The Project

2019 marks 250 years since the first onshore meetings between Māori and Europeans in New Zealand. Tuia 250 is the national commemoration that recognises these encounters as milestones in our history.

Īpipiri (the Eastern Bay of Islands) is a key Tuia 250 location as Captain Cook and his Endeavour crew spent a week there in 1769. Ahead of the commemorations, Russell Museum contracted us to create a digital map table that tells the stories of that historically significant week, and the natural history story of this part of Aotearoa.

The Tuia 250 tagline is “Dual Heritage, Shared Future” - the table is an expression of this theme with its balanced approach to storytelling, capturing both Māori and Pākehā worldviews. We worked closely with our client on the content for these stories, which we translated into animations with the help of illustrator Andy Shaw and Dusk.

The Result

The result is a stunning interactive AV experience that delights visitors of all ages. Using a mounted touchscreen, visitors can chose from two main stories, each with four individual chapters. Each chapter is between 3 and 5 minutes long. The stories are projected onto a 3D canvas - a large CNC-routed map of Īpipiri. The physical extrusion of the mountains and hills can be touched by visitors, adding a tactile element which helps to bring the map alive.