Purdue FarmHouse
A touchscreen archive of FarmHouse history.
An interactive display for Purdue FarmHouse lets visitors explore photographs of its members by decade and year. I designed and implemented the original experience.
The project
Explore a fraternity’s history by decade and year.
This is an installed touchscreen archive for Purdue FarmHouse, a fraternity at Purdue University. Visitors can browse historical composite photographs: images that bring together the portraits and names of members from a particular year.
The project turns that image collection into something a person can explore on a shared display. Instead of facing the whole archive at once, a visitor follows a short sequence to find a year and look at its members.
- Choose a decade. Start with a broad period of FarmHouse history.
- Select a year. Narrow the archive to a particular group of members.
- View the composite. Open the photograph, then use Back to return to the menus and explore another year.
My role
Designing and implementing the original experience.
I designed and implemented the original FarmHouse touchscreen experience. This work was part of a broader period creating interactive displays at Beck’s Hybrids, where I worked on ways to make collections of information and media accessible in physical spaces.
For FarmHouse, my contribution connected the content structure to the interaction: deciding how visitors would move through the archive, designing the screens, and implementing the touch navigation. The result had to function on the installed display, beyond a set of static layouts.
How I built it
Turn the collection into screens and touch paths.
I organized the experience around decade menus, year choices, and individual composite images. I implemented the display program in BrightAuthor, software used to create presentations and interactive experiences for BrightSign media players.
The program connects an area of the touchscreen to the screen it should open. A year choice opens its composite; a Back control returns to a menu. Connecting those screens made the archive’s structure something a visitor could navigate directly.
Decision 01
Use time as the path into the collection.
The archive is made up of yearly composites, so decade and year provide a direct way to narrow it. The first choice is broad; the second is specific. The full photograph appears once the visitor has selected the year.
That structure keeps the first menu from carrying every year at once. It also gives the visitor a consistent sequence to repeat when exploring another part of the collection.
A familiar path through the archive
- Decade
- Year
- Photo
Back returns through the same hierarchy.
Decision 02
Give every detailed view a visible way back.
Reaching a photograph is only half the interaction. A visitor also needs to leave it and choose something else. The demonstrated experience returns from a composite to its year choices, then back to the decade menu.
Back controls appear on both lower sides of the composite view. They keep the return action visible while the photograph occupies the main part of the display. The same navigation structure carries the visitor into and out of the archive.
Result & reflection
An archive that remained in use.
The experience was installed, and in March 2023 a FarmHouse contact confirmed that the display was still up and functioning. My portfolio demonstration, published the following month, shows the year menus, composite view, and return navigation in use.
This project shows the connection between organizing information and implementing an interface. The content hierarchy became the menu structure, and the menu structure became the touch behavior. The result was a collection people could browse on the display, with a clear path to the next image.