Case study | Producing playful digital content

Manchester Museum’s Wild exhibition (until 5 June 2025) looks at how people across the world have taken action to create, rebuild and repair connections with nature.

This includes empowering visitors to take action that is appropriate to them, so the final section of the exhibition, Wild Futures, helps them to think about what matters to them and how their own relationship with the natural world relates to their values.

The museum worked with digital story studio Fast Familiar to create a personality test-style quiz to help visitors explore how personal values shape perceptions of nature and wildness. The interactive experience also provides the museum with valuable insights into visitor opinions.

Creating the quiz

Relationships with nature differ significantly depending on the person and their context. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF), developed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, offers a tool that celebrates this complexity.

Within this framework, there are three perspectives:

1. Nature for Nature (valuing nature for what it is).
2. Nature for Culture (valuing people and nature existing happily together).
3. Nature for Society (valuing nature for all the benefits it provides us).

This was the starting point for an interactive element. It needed to have a dwell time of about five minutes, so we’ve used a quiz format – the kind that seeks opinions and then gives a “diagnosis”. People are familiar with the format and it has a light-hearted feel.

We analysed each NFF perspective and created statements from them that people could agree or disagree with on a scale of one to 10.

But how could we present someone’s “diagnosis” back to them, as the NFF aims to bridge divisions on the best approach to climate action, and people rarely agree with only one perspective?

We opted to use a spider web visual, with each spoke representing a statement in the quiz. The more strongly someone agrees with a statement, the further from the centre the spider draws that part of the web.

Statements corresponding to each perspective are positioned next to each other, so the shape of the web shows how aligned the respondent
is to each perspective.

Many interactive exhibitions are aimed at younger visitors. But we wanted something that adults would also want to do.

We spent time refining the language and reference points used in the statements, to make them user-friendly and non-intimidating for people of all ages. “Nature is always wild” is a statement that a nine-year old is as well equipped to agree or disagree with as a 79-year-old.

Outcomes

We put the quiz through iterative testing before moving to production. It needed to have a playful feel, make people feel empowered to take climate action, and remain thought-provoking.

Allowing people to take a printed ticket home lets them process the information at their own pace. A comparison tool on the Manchester Museum website enables them to see how their unique web relates to an average one that updates in real time.

We’re delighted with how popular the interactive has been. We’ve seen families and adult groups talking through questions and discussing responses, and individuals thinking through answers.

It is also gathering a bank of information for the museum; we can see whether visitors are taking away the key messages we’ve intended.

We are also building a dataset about where visitors position themselves in relation to nature and how they value the natural world. This information will be vital in ensuring that our future programming is relevant and interesting.

Rachel Briscoe is the creative director at Fast Familiar and Hannah-Lee Chalk is the curator of learning at Manchester Museum