Honeypot is a day-long event, aimed at informing the public about the process of making honey. This event includes promotional materials, signage, wayfinding, structures to put in the Penn State Pollinator Garden, an augmented reality experience for the phone, a gift and packaging, and a uniform hat for volunteers.

 

The Arboretum is a botanical garden located at the edge of Penn State University’s campus. In the summer of 2021, the Pollinator and Bird Garden was opened to the public, with the goal of attracting native pollinators to the Arboretum and to inform visitors. That fall, Taylor Kuszyk and I were approached to create a user interface for the Pollinator Garden, focusing on the “Hidden World of the Arboretum.”  

After a tour of the garden by Harland Patch (Assistant Research Professor and Director of Pollinator Programming), we decided to focus on the process of how bees make honey, specifically creating an event in late September to celebrate it.

Our target audience was originally the students who go to Penn State, but we expanded it to a larger audience of 15-30 year olds. We then worked out a user scenario of the day, detailing how the target audience would go through the late-September event.

A promotional video was created to draw people to the event. The day of the event is September 22nd, to celebrate the end of the summer and honey-harvesting season for bees before it becomes too cold, and they hibernate for the winter. 

Next, visitors come to the Arboretum for the festival. Honeycomb-like structures greet guests at the entrance, with QR codes that bring up the AR app experience.

Wayfinding, maps, and signage guide the guest through the Pollinator Garden to complete the AR experience.

The AR app was designed from scratch using XD, as well as several animations that teach the user about honey-making.  

After the user completes all five stations around the Pollinator Garden, they can find a volunteer in a branded bucket hat. If they show the volunteer their finish screen, they receive a gift pot of honey and packaging from the honeycomb shelves.

In addition to branding the event itself, we designed the app and animations. We also laser-cut out each station’s QR code in wood and painted them, and the honey jar and packaging were printed and crafted by my partner and me. This event taught the complexities of creating an outcome that would best serve the community and topic at hand, as well as the complexities of working out several deliverables to fit the topic and event.