Interactive Visitor Experience for Norway's Nature Centre

Overview

The Norwegian Nature Center (Norsk Natursenter) is the official visitor centre for Hardangervidda National Park and one of Norway's best-known interactive visitor attractions. As part of a major redevelopment, Sarner commissioned me to lead the interaction design for a suite of 19 digital experiences spanning three floors of the centre.

Working alongside Sarner's creative team, I translated exhibit concepts into engaging touchscreen experiences that balanced education with exploration. Although my primary responsibility was interaction design, I also delivered the frontend implementation, reflecting my T-shaped skill set and ability to bridge design and development throughout the delivery process.

Role & process

As the Lead Interaction Designer I worked between creative, technical and production teams to shape how visitors would engage with each exhibit. Rather than simply producing interfaces, my role was to define behaviours - how content responded to touch, how visitors discovered information and how interactions remained intuitive for audiences of all ages and nationalities.

Each exhibit presented different objectives, requiring bespoke interaction models rather than a single design system. I mapped user journeys, prototyped interaction patterns and collaborated closely with stakeholders to ensure every interactive experience balanced creativity, usability and technical feasibility.

Alongside the design leadership, I also implemented the frontend applications. This allowed interaction ideas to evolve rapidly during development and ensured the final experiences closely reflected the approved designs.

Challenges & solutions

Designing beyond standard touch interactions:
Most touchscreen experiences rely on taps and swipes. Many of these installations required visitors to manipulate digital objects using multiple digits and even both hands simultaneously, including rotating, scaling and moving independent elements for extremely advanced interactions. Designing these interactions meant carefully balancing discoverability with playfulness so that visitors could experiment naturally without needing instructions. It also required careful consideration of technical feasibility and hardware capabilities.

Designing beyond standard touch interactions:
The centre welcomes visitors from around the world, requiring every exhibit to support 13 languages without compromising usability or layout. I designed and implemented a centralised localisation framework that separated interface content from the application logic, allowing translations to be managed consistently across every experience while accommodating vastly different text lengths and character sets.

Reliability under continuous public use:
Unlike consumer products, these exhibits needed to remain operational throughout the day with minimal intervention despite heavy usage and unpredictable visitor behaviour. I introduced inactivity recovery, diagnostic logging and monitoring features while collaborating with the wider technical team on automated startup and shutdown processes to improve long-term reliability and simplify maintenance.

Designing remotely for a physical space:
Most of the project was delivered remotely from the UK despite being designed for bespoke installations in Norway. Working without access to the final hardware meant interactions had to be prototyped and validated through local test environments before being refined during on-site installation and testing.

Outcome & reflections

Seeing the installations come to life on site was one of the most rewarding moments of the project. After months of remote collaboration, I travelled to Norway during installation to support final testing, make last-minute refinements and observe visitors interacting with the exhibits for the first time.

Experiencing the applications within the carefully crafted exhibition spaces provided valuable insight that simply isn't possible in a studio environment. Watching families, school groups and international tourists intuitively engage with the experiences validated many of the interaction decisions made throughout the project, while also highlighting small opportunities for refinement before launch.

The project remains one of the most technically and creatively challenging pieces of work I've delivered, combining complex interaction design, multilingual accessibility and real-world operational resilience across a large public installation.