Color of Life
There’s more to color than meets the eye. Color takes center stage in this exhibition, offering surprising discoveries and unanswered mysteries about what shapes the colors we see in nature.
A specimen display includes animals with colors that serve as warning or defense.
Color of Life is rich with specimens from the museum’s collections and live animals, including a color-changing octopus, a green tree python, and brilliantly colored finches.
Cutting-edge interactives allow visitors to immerse themselves in a symphony of color and view the world through the eyes of an animal, visualizing how color communicates, attracts, and camouflages within and between species.
The Color Visualizer interactive blends a physical interface with rich digital content. Visitors pluck colored strings to activate animations, sounds, and fascinating short stories about color in nature.
Visitors look through View-Master-style devices and experience disappearing acts by a tiger and giraffes. These interactives demonstrate how camouflage allows even large animals to vanish with surprising ease—in the right environment.
A specimen display showcases brilliant hues arising from pigments and microscopic structures.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Project Type & Size
Long-term Exhibition
8000 square feet
Location
California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA
Project Role
Associate Director of Exhibit Development: project & editorial direction, coaching and supervision of experience and content developers, liaison with C-suite decision-makers, collaborate on marketing and communications planning.
Collaborators
California Academy of Sciences: Exhibit Studio, Creative Studio, Visualization Studio, Experience Engineering, Interactive, Curatorial & Collections staff
Interactive Design: Tellart, Unified Field
Fabrication: Lexington, Group Delphi
Visitors delight in watching the Gouldian finches as they feed and flit about the aviary.
An aviary houses a flock of multi-colored Gouldian finches.
In this playful multimedia interactive, visitors learn about — and try to mimic — the mating choreography of birds and spiders.
Image credits (all): Kathryn Whitney © California Academy of Sciences