Etkti the alien

An interactive museum exhibit with an alien

Challenge: What type of persona should this alien have? How will the exhibit space and creative visuals affect the experience?

Year

2022

Role

Content Lead & Conversational AI Expert

Domains

Infotainment, digital avatars,

Overview

Are aliens real? What if you could talk to one?

The Museum of Pecularities and Oddities in St, Helens, Oregon specializes in otherworldy and the unknown. They contacted StoryFile to create a very unique project: an alien! They wanted to have an interactive alien exhibit where guests could come up and ask questions to it, along with being able to use it in a docent-led program when needed.

The driving force behind this entire experience was: what will this be like for the user? Since it would be relatively unique experience, and as a result there were a few key components we had to keep in mind throughout the entire design process, from the conversation design side:

How can we make this experience intuitive to the user?
How do we justify the existence of this alien here and now, at least enough to sustain a suspension of disbelief?
How will the creative visuals affect the dialogs?

Design and Workflow

User research: What do people want to ask aliens?

Creating an alien exhibit poses unique content, UX & CXD challenges. First off, well, it's an alien. How do you justify its existence? Why is it here? How will it be received?

On the content side, this was a team of three, with myself being the content lead, and the two other members part of the creative team. Due to this project being a infotainment museum exhibit, we considered a variety of things while developing the design (while keeping in mind the client's requirements). Where was the museum located? What were the surrounding exhibits like? How long did we want these interactions to run for? What type of alien lore did we want to use? Did we want to create an entirely original concept, or lean into infamous alien/UFO stories? Additionally, since we knew this would be a public experience, we also had to consider: what would be the most common questions people would ask, therefore having content we absolutely had to capture? People visit this particular museum to see the wacky and unusual: guests could range from alien experts, to people casually looking around. We needed the content to be able to satisfy a wide range of guests. The questions a casual passer-byer would ask would be different from someone who's into UFO landings.

In order to get a general idea of what the top questions would be, we designed and sent out a public, anonymous survey on SurveryMonkey asking people what they would like to ask an alien. The survey itself had five questions, and within a week we received around 150 participants. We then sorted through the responses and noticed some general patterns: most of the questions were 'introductory' type questions about why the alien was here, why they decided to speak to them, etc. Another popular topic was questions about science (space travel, nuclear fusion).

We sorted those responses and used them as a foundation for our scripting/creative process.

We also experimented lightly with ChatGPT3 (this was before GPT4 was released) to generate common potential questions. We noticed in our surveys that the top questions from survey takers were questions such as 'why are you here,' 'what are you.' 'are you a girl or a boy,' and similar introductory questions in that vein. We collapse both into a large document, and used that data to make sure we addressed the top queries throughout our alien experience.

Creating a story

This was a list of words I made up for the experience -- I had a running list of consonant clusters I was working with. It's nowhere near a conlang by any means (I didn't come up with a grammar), but it was fun to make up words.

Can you tell a linguist had some fun on this project? The image above is a test dialog from when we were thinking of experimenting with syntax -- we were brainstorming ways to make the alien sound, well, alien, and messing with syntax is definitely one of those ways. We eventually scrapped the idea because our creative lead thought (rightfully so!) that it would remind users of Star Wars and we wanted this experience to be original. Yoda speaks in object-subject-verb (OSV, which is referenced in the sticky note, I wrote a few lines in that word order) by default; in English, we use this format for emphasis, but not in regular speech. It's why it pings as strange in our brains. Still, it was fun to experiment with, especially on such a creative persona!

We needed to create an original backstory for this alien. It needed to explain it's extended presence in St. Helens (to explain why the exhibit exists), and we wanted to also reference local history. Establishing the purpose & backstory for this alien would determine the entire experience and how visitors would interact with them, and in turn that meant that finding the right tone and persona was essential. In this particular case, nailing the right tone and persona was essential. People would already be approaching this experience with pre-conceived noitions about aliens and outer space; too niche, and we'd lose casual visitors. Too general, and UFO/alien fans would find it boring.

There were several interactions of backstory; we talked about an Earth-like homeworld, a water planet a la Waterworld, but settled on a being from a fiery, volcanic planet. With my background in linguistics, I also did some preliminary brainstorming with conlanging (creating a language from scratch) and experimenting with different syntactic orders in English (verb-subject-object, subject-object-verb, etc). Ultimately it was determined that playing with syntactic order in this context would remind users of a very specific little green man too much. Instead, we opted to include 'alien' words scattered throughout their speech instead. If you ever have a chance to see this exhibit live and If you find Etkti hard to pronounce, I went out of my way to try and find consonant clusters that aren’t very common in most Englishes, so it’s not you, it's me, I did that on purpose. We also toyed with different types of personalities (friendly, more guarded, etc). After our client decided on a final alien visual & voice design and a few meetings, our alien ended up with a friendlier, open, yet firm personality. We wanted visitors to feel welcomed and treat this almost like a cultural exchange, but make it so it was clear that Etkti wasn't a push-over.

A late-stage draft of a dialog flow for the introductory sequence of the experience, for both potential programs. Some changes in animation and wake words were added on later.

After a lot of brainstorming, several different universes, name concepts, and working sessions we came up with a script that would be the foundation of the experience. Additionally, we provided a creative treatment that addressed two ways the experience could be used: as a standalone exhibit, with people being able to come up to the alien and ask questions, and an ~30 session that was docent led, using the alien as a partner in the experience. We scripted the experience with the idea in mind that it could be used in these two ways.

One of our main concerns was that users would ask questions outside of scope. The experience we were creating was intended to be very specific, about this particular alien talking about why it was here in the first place. Our surveys demonstrated that the most common questions would be the typical 5 W's, but what about afterwards? What would people ask after learning why an alien is on earth? The answers in our surveys gave us a good idea: there were questions about the alien's home planet, its culture and the like, and so we focused our content on that. In terms of error handling, we included responses that would redirect users to content that was readily avaliable.

Our client also requested that the experience could be done in two ways:

a) standalone exhibit: guests could come up to the display and interact with it like a normal conversation, with some guidance through signage, potential prompt suggestions, external exhibit add-ons

b) docent-led program: a museum docent could talk to the display, use specific trigger phrases/wake words, and the alien would respond.

While the content would be the same regardless of the experience, we had to craft the dialog flows with both of these things in mind.

Outcomes

A local legend brought to life

This experience is currently live at an exhibit at the Museum of Peculiarities & Oddities in St, Helens, Oregon. At this time there is no plan to host the experience online as well. It's been received and has been used in two Halloweentown events, and other special experiences.

If there was an opportunity to do further work on this experience, it would be interesting to be able to include more 'alien speak' within the experience. Additionally, people are very enthusiastic to learn an alien's favorite color, for example (a response we later added). Further research with voice tonality would help flesh out the experience; there were certain traits that were attributed to the alien based on the voice (gender, sexuality, age) that we did not account for, even with the voice being a digitally altered model.

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