Outdoor Literacy Garden
Strategy, Design & Project Leadership Mississippi Children’s Museum
I translated the museum’s early-literacy mission into a creative direction for interactive outdoor experiences, bringing language, storytelling, and discovery-based play together.
The Challenge
The Mississippi Children’s Museum needed to translate its early literacy and language-development goals into engaging outdoor experiences that children and families could understand, explore, and enjoy together. The challenge was to bring educational purpose, storytelling, play, and connection to nature together in a new outdoor garden.
The museum also needed a partner to articulate the project’s educational value and creative vision to support partnership development and grant writing
The Strategy
I helped shape the design strategy through research, community interviews, and an advisory panel of early-literacy specialists and university researchers that I convened and facilitated. Drawing on those insights, I defined a creative direction for the garden’s interactive experiences: using listening, audio-based storytelling, and discovery-based play to support the oral-language foundations of reading and spark awe and curiosity about language.
One project I led combined community oral histories with a spatial audio system designed for both recorded stories and live storytelling. I oversaw the collection of community recordings and commissioned the system’s technical development, enabling museum staff to direct audio across a three-dimensional arrangement of sound pylons. Stories could unfold around visitors, turning listening into a shared, place-based experience.
