Design Students Win 2025 Core77 Notable Student Award for Future City
Future City, an interactive museum experience designed by Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design Master’s students Alexis Morrell, Ivy Huang, Jean Chu and Sandra Chang has been recognized with “Student Notable” Award at the 2025 Core77 Design Awards in the category of Emerging Technologies. Future City was designed in partnership with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) and it reimagines how younger generations engage with natural history by connecting the past, present and future through immersive storytelling.
The idea for Future City originated from a guiding question: What do people hope to see and remember when visiting a museum?
The team wanted to create an experience that deepened humanity’s connection to natural history and connect those learnings to their everyday lives. Instead of only looking back at artifacts from thousands of years ago, visitors are invited to visualize how the past connects to the present and the choices shaping tomorrow’s environment.
“Nature is at the core of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and we saw an opportunity to highlight that humans are not separate from nature—we’re part of it,” said Sandra Chang. “We also wanted visitors, especially younger generations, to leave with lasting impressions that extend beyond the museum’s walls.”
The group wanted to cater to the Gen Z patrons of CMNH and guide them in connecting human choices with nature in an urban setting. The experience begins with onboarding, where visitors learn what to expect on their journey. As they explore the museum’s seven permanent exhibition halls, they collect unique elements tied to each hall: an egg in the Bird Hall, a seed in the Botany Hall, a fossil in another. Using AR on their mobile devices, these elements evolve in surprising ways: fossils transform into modern-day resources, seeds sprout into trees, and eggs hatch into birds.
The journey culminates at the Wall of Future City, an interactive projection of Pittsburgh. Visitors contribute their collected elements through gestures—watering a plant, hatching an egg that symbolically demonstrates how individual actions shape an ecosystem and blend into the larger projection, co-creating a shared future city.
This final collective cityscape reinforces the project’s central theme: every decision we make has an impact on the world around us, connecting people, nature, and community in memorable ways.
Throughout the the process of developing Future City, the team faced numerous design challenges like:
- Gesture accessibility: Ensuring the system could recognize movements from people of different heights, body types, and abilities
- Device inclusion: Designing experiences to include those without mobile devices.
- Clarity of process: Simplifying instructions so visitors could join at any point and still meaningfully engage.
“Designing for accessibility while keeping the interactions fun and intuitive was a key challenge,” said Chang. “It pushed us to simplify flows and test prototypes extensively.”
For the team, the project reflects key lessons learned at the School of Design.
“At Carnegie Mellon University, we’re encouraged to explore open-ended problems without being boxed in by rigid frameworks,” explained Chang. “We learned to think big, then iterate through prototypes to make bold concepts tangible.” The team approached the project holistically, considering digital, physical, and social contexts to craft a seamless and impactful experience.
The School of Design extends heartfelt congratulations to Alexis, Ivy, Jean and Sandra for their creativity and innovation in bringing Future City to life. Projects like Future City exemplify how design can transform museum visits into immersive journeys of connection, imagination, and shared responsibility for the future.