The topic I chose for this museum is personal technology, specifically the devices that
changed how ordinary people lived between the 1970s and the 2010s. I wanted to
document four categories: personal computers, mobile phones, music players, and the
early internet. These are technologies that most people either lived through or grew up
hearing about, and I thought a digital museum was the right format to present them
seriously, the way a real institution would.
The main story of the site is a journey through four decades of change. Each exhibit
follows one technology from its earliest form to the point where it became part of
everyday life. The personal computers exhibit starts with the Altair 8800, a kit you had to
assemble yourself with no keyboard and no screen, and ends with the IBM PC, which
set the standard for the next thirty years. The mobile phones exhibit starts with the
Motorola DynaTAC, a phone that weighed almost two pounds and cost four thousand
dollars, and ends with the first iPhone. The idea is that visitors move through these
rooms and see not just what the devices were, but why they mattered and how they
connected to each other.
For the design style, I used Bauhaus. Bauhaus is a design movement from 1919 that
believed every element on a page should serve a purpose. If something is only there to
look good, it does not belong. That meant using one font, a simple three color palette of
black, white, and red, a clean grid layout, and no decorative elements at all. The goal
was for the site to look structured and serious, like something you would see in a real
museum, not a student project.
The brand archetype I chose is the Sage. The Sage is a personality built around sharing
knowledge clearly and honestly. It does not try to entertain or sell anything. Every piece
of writing on the site follows that approach. There is no promotional language anywhere.
The writing is calm, direct, and always backed up by a source.
The Cialdini principle I used is Authority. The idea behind Authority is that people trust
content more when it comes from a source that seems credible and knowledgeable. To
apply this, every exhibit page cites at least two well known institutions, including the
Computer History Museum, the Smithsonian, and Britannica. Each page has a
dedicated sources panel at the bottom. The clean layout and consistent formatting also
signal professionalism, which reinforces the sense that the content is reliable.
For the AI portion of the project, I used AI to write all of the code, copy, and help with
the documentation. But I did not just type one prompt and accept whatever came out. I
gave AI detailed written instructions before any work began, had it review its own plans
before writing anything, and checked its output against clear standards each time. I
made the decisions about what to build and why. AI handled the actual writing and
building. This kept the work focused and made it possible to catch problems early.
The orchestration process I used is a six step workflow. Every feature went through a
spec, a spec review, a sprint document, a sprint review, implementation, and then a final
quality check. The spec explained what to build and the reason behind it. The sprint
document listed the exact files, components, and content decisions involved. Both
documents were reviewed before any code was written. After building, automated
checks confirmed everything worked, including type checking, linting, unit tests, and a
full build. The key advantage of this process is that it solves a common problem with AI
development. Without written documents, AI loses track of the original plan between
sessions. The specs served as the memory of the project, so every session started from
the same foundation.
Finally, the site improved through a structured review process. After the site was built, I
prompted AI to act as a senior curator from the Smithsonian Institution and evaluate the
site as a real exhibition proposal. The review identified five areas that needed work: the
exhibits had no cross references connecting them to each other, the curatorial notes
needed to go deeper, the cultural impact sections needed specific facts instead of
vague statements, the homepage needed a clearer suggested path for new visitors, and
the site needed real images for each artifact. I then addressed the images by sourcing
and uploading photographs for all twelve artifacts across the four exhibits, and pushed
those updates to the live site. The curator review turned critique into a concrete list of
improvements, making the revision process a success.