Entertainment Technology student, aspiring Experience Designer
External-facing producer handling client relations, team dynamics, budgeting, and ordering
equipment for a team developing a minimum viable product for the Heinz History Center’s 2027 exhibit on
Western Pennsylvania's amusement park heritage.
Client-facing producer, working on maintaining client relations, running meetings, handling budgeting and purchase orders, and ensuring task management is on track.
Narrative designer creating interactive narratives that fulfill the client's historic learning objectives, while also telling personalised stories.
Playtesting prototype setup.
A prototype minimum viable product for the Heinz History Center's 2027 exhibit on Western Pennsylvania's amusement park heritage.
We landed on a physical installation where guests walk up to a table with a terrain of an amusement park with four missing pieces of different shapes. The table has recognisable 3D printed amusement park attractions that have bases in the same shapes as these empty slots. These figures have different colours, and when all four pieces from the same colour are placed on the board, we unlock different rewards like colour, animation, and narrative.
Budgeting and purchase orders and task management.
Budget and purchases document.
Estimated budget, purchases, and equipment checked out.
Scheduling and task management.
Our final organizational board by my
co-producer Cayla Kennedy.
Post-it notes that mark the start and end of each task, with dependencies being stuck to eachother. When the takss are complete, the two halves of the note come together.
Conducted weekly meetings with clients and coordinated site visits, demos, playtests, and project needs and experience goals.
Meeting agenda and notes sample.
Organized playtests with multiple audiences - school groups, multigenerational family groups, and CMU students. Coordinated with faculty, staff, and client to acquire the right audiences and space setup. Onboarded guests to these experiences, provided context, took observation-based notes, and conducted interviews about user behaviour. Analysed this data for discussions with team, faculty advisors, and clients, and worked with team to find the bets directions for new iterations.
Playtesting.
Playtest interviews and feedback collection.
Created during a producer roundtable retrospective workshop run by Stef Harbuck and Charles Johnson.
As a first-time producer on a project this long, as well as my first time handling client interactions, I learnt a lot in my role.
One of the most challenging moments was handling internal team dynamics and conflicts within the team, and realising how I could have detected them sooner.
Client relations was another major learning point, especially in taking in client needs and making sure they are understood well by the team, and handling rebuilding relations after misaligned expectations early on.
Yifan Chen, Jimmy Jian, Cayla Kennedy, Jack Peng, Handan Zhang
