Museum of Cryptography
Moscow, 2020
The Cryptography Museum is a science and technology museum about the history of cryptography and communication. I developed concepts, scripts, and interaction scenarios for around 15 interactive exhibits, both digital and physical. My task was to turn complex technical topics into clear and engaging visitor experiences. The concepts were later produced by specialized design, architecture, and engineering teams.
Client
Studio Polden, Museum of Cryptography
Project Role
Exhibition Concept Design UX Design
Industries
Interactive Exhibitions
Date
Apr–Sep 2020
A hands-on installation exploring the evolution of writing systems. Visitors rotate the blocks to connect meanings, pictograms, hieroglyphs, cuneiform signs, and alphabetic letters, discovering how modern writing emerged from visual symbols.
This installation introduces visitors to litoreya, a simple substitution cipher used in Ancient Rus'. A humorous message is encrypted using the cipher, and visitors must decode it with the help of a key. To reveal the original phrase, they place wooden letter tiles into the missing slots, gradually reconstructing the text.
As part of the section dedicated to the 21st century, this installation introduced visitors to Unicode encoding. By entering the code point of an emoji matching their mood, visitors could send it to a shared screen, where it joined a growing collection of emojis from other guests.
A hacker's workspace featuring key figures and events in hacktivism. An accompanying anonymous survey invited visitors to share their views on the ethical aspects of hacking through a retro computer interface.
