Etkti, an alien

An interactive museum exhibit with an alien 

     This is a unique museum exhibit at the Museum of Peculiarities & Oddities. Within an interactive display case, the user can see a digital image of an alien. Depending on whether its a stand-alone exhibit or part of a docent-led program, users are able to come up to the alien and ask questions about the alien’s homeworld, past life, purpose and location. The content and backstory is all original and unique to the alien, with the occasional pop culture references, along with some references to St. Helens’s local history. 

*this image is an AI-generated, artistic representation of the exhibit/alien on display; you can see the real thing in-person at MPAO in St. Helen's, Oregon, USA!


  • Creating an alien

The Museum of Peculiarities and Oddities specializes in the otherworldy and the unknown. They contacted StoryFile to create a very unique exhibit: 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:

  • UX research on 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 stories?

Some sorted responses we received in our survey.

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 would range from alien experts, to people casually looking around. We needed our content to be able to satisfy this wide range of guests, in order for everyone to leave from the experience satisfied. 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. 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 (aka: establishing persona, voice and tone)

A sample of an early draft of a scripted dialog experimenting with different English syntax styles (here I believe OSV referred to a phrase before this one), along with some of the first ideas we had concerning backstory. Eventually both ideas (the lore and syntax style) were scrapped and completely rewritten.

We wanted to create an original backstory for this alien that ultimately explained it’s extended presence in St. Helens that also referenced its local history. We knew that establishing a purpose & backstory for this mysterious figure would determine the entire experience, and impact how we its tone and personality. We went through several iterations (including an earth-like version, water planet) and settled on a being from an 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, and so we opted to include ‘alien’ words here and there 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. We also toyed with different types of personalities (friendly, more guarded, etc). After seeing the initial concept art and overall art direction, we opted for a friendlier, open yet firm personality that reflected the visuals of the alien, along with the final voice model.

  • Scripting alien interactions

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. 

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. 

  • If the alien could see the future...

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 if the voice was a digitally altered model. 


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.