Museums have always asked visitors to show up.
To walk through a space, read the placards, absorb what they can, and leave having learned something. The best museums create a feeling: proximity to history, an understanding of a life or a moment or a movement that a textbook never quite manages. But the experience has limits. You can only put so much on a wall. You can only ask so much of a visitor's imagination. And you can only display a fraction of a collection, constrained by physical space and the delicate realities of preservation.
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has been at the forefront of reimagining the museum environment since it opened in 2005, with multi-sensory spaces, innovative exhibits, and a reputation for doing things differently. In 2024, they wanted to go further: to use augmented reality to create experiences no physical exhibit could replicate, to reach younger audiences, diverse audiences, and families who learn together, and to bring stories to life, including the ones that deserved more space than the walls could give them.
The risk was real. AR used poorly doesn't just disappoint. It alienates. It gets in the way of the very connection it's supposed to create. The brief wasn't to build something technically impressive. It was to build something that earned its place in a space people visit because they care about history.
That was the brief. We built Lincoln Unlocked.
Where we started
I started where I always start: with the people who would actually use it. Visitor research, interviews, and discovery work grounded every later decision in real human goals, pain points, and interests. The museum's educational priorities were in the room from day one too. Every AR experience had to serve the learning, not overshadow it. Technology in service of the story, not the other way around.
Building the team, building the foundation
The first thing I did was staff the team with intention. I had three spots to fill and a clear picture of what the work would demand.
Kara Saje came in carrying the creative and visual knowhow from the pursuit phase. She had already lived the early vision of this project and brought that continuity with her from day one. Together, Kara and Juan were the powerhouse behind our branding work, the creative engine that gave Lincoln Unlocked its visual identity and its soul. (Kara has a level of creativity that leaves me breathless. Check her out.)
Juan Trapp could bridge visual and UX with the fluency a project this hybrid demanded. (Juan is easily one of the sharpest visual designers I've ever met. Check him out.)
For the UX foundation, I brought in Kira Davies, someone I'd worked with on a previous engagement and trusted completely to help anchor our design approach from the ground up. (Kira has an unmatched work ethic and design ethos. Check her out.)
I built the team to balance the known work against the unknowns of designing AR and XR at this scale, for this audience, for the first time. That balance let us move into genuinely unfamiliar territory without losing our footing.
We also needed to go beyond our own team. One of the most immersive experiences in the app, the Gettysburg Address sequence, where scanning a mural brings it to life with animation, sound, and movement as the speech plays, required animation and 3D artistry beyond what we had in house. I scoped the role and ran the hiring process for an external XR animation contractor: interviewing artists, reviewing portfolios, and understanding exactly how they'd approach work none of us had fully done before. Managing them turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly valuable parts of the project. They were so adept at 3D design and animation that they taught the design team a wealth of things about how to plan, ideate, and execute this kind of work. A reminder I carry with me: you don't know what you don't know, and the right collaborator doesn't just fill a gap, they expand what you thought was possible.
Lincoln Unlocked: designing wonder, accessibly
The app needed to be two things at once: flexible enough to present any type of content across any themed tour structure the museum might want, and extensible enough to grow with the institution over time. Those aren't just technical requirements. They're design constraints that shaped every decision we made about architecture, content structure, and experience flow.
The experiences we built inside that architecture were genuinely unlike anything we'd designed before.
Visitors could bring their phone's camera to a symbol and watch a digital replica of a historical artifact appear, then rotate it, examine it from every angle, and hold a piece of history that preservation rules would never let them touch. Take Mary Lincoln's music box: wind it up, and hear the same music Mary would have heard in the 1860s. Two full interactive spaces layered digital experiences onto physical rooms through the camera, with characters to tap, sound bites to trigger from digitally rendered objects, and stories unlocked by where you were standing. And the Gettysburg Address: scan the mural, and watch history come alive.
The thematic tours followed the physically designed space of the museum across two journeys, guiding visitors through Lincoln's life room by room, era by era. The app was a companion to that physical space, deepening it, extending it, and making the stories and artifacts of the collection accessible in ways the physical environment alone never could.
We also designed for the people who keep that experience running. The content management system we built gave museum staff the ability to update exhibits, rotate artifacts, and deliver content in six languages, all without touching a line of code. Because a great visitor experience doesn't sustain itself. It requires the people behind the scenes to have tools designed with the same care and intention as the things visitors see. We designed for both.
Accessibility was a core principle throughout, and it was the hardest design problem on the project. There's a mature body of accessible patterns for screens. There is almost nothing for augmented reality, where the content lives in physical space and depends on a visitor holding up a phone. We had to invent our approach rather than borrow one. Closed captioning, text-to-speech, and multilingual support covered the foundations. The harder decision was what to do for visitors using a screen reader, for whom a camera-based experience could be a dead end. Before every AR and XR moment, we placed descriptive text, written for screen readers, that gave an overview of what happens in the experience. A visitor could take in the whole moment without ever entering AR. Designing at the edges of accessibility in an AR context pushed us to be more creative, more intentional, and more human in every decision. It always does.
And we designed the experience so that the content could highlight the stories that needed to be told. The women who shaped the Lincoln era. First-hand accounts of resistance and survival. Voices that history has too often left in the margins, given the space and the medium they deserved.
The trust that made it possible
What made all of this achievable had nothing to do with technology. We could only visit the museum once a month. The team had to design and test deeply spatial, deeply physical AR experiences remotely, then come together quickly on site to ideate, pressure-test, and extend our ideas in the real space. That kind of working relationship doesn't happen automatically. It's built through clear expectations, radical transparency, and enough shared experience that a team can anticipate each other's thinking even when they're not in the same room.
This was the largest design team I'd ever led: four designers, counting me, each deeply talented, with genuinely different perspectives and skills. It was a dream, not because it was easy, but because of what we built together. The people made it the best part. They always do.
The sabbatical
Midway through the project, I left for a planned three-month sabbatical.
The design principal. The person leading the team, holding the vision, managing the client relationships, anchoring the cross-functional work. Gone for three months.
Because it was planned, I could design for it. The team knew the design strategy cold. They had internalized the principles. The work was planned far enough ahead. Most importantly, they knew my perspective, my ethos, and my direction so completely that they didn't need me in the room to make good decisions. They were already making them.
I didn't worry once. Not because I was disconnected from the work, but because I'd built something that didn't depend on my constant presence to function: a team that trusted each other, communicated openly, and had the craft and clarity to keep moving without me.
When I came back, the work was still running. Still good. Still theirs.
I have never been more proud of anything I've built as a leader.
What this project taught me
The best design teams aren't built around a leader. They're built around shared values, mutual trust, and a clarity of direction that outlasts any single person's presence. My job was never to be indispensable. It was to make myself unnecessary: to grow a team so capable and so aligned that stepping back wasn't a risk. It was just a thing that happened.
Lincoln Unlocked was built for a museum that welcomes 200,000+ visitors a year, and for what a cultural institution can do with AR when it's genuinely educational, genuinely accessible, and genuinely moving.
But the thing I think about most isn't the mural coming to life or the music box or the Gettysburg Address playing through someone's phone in a room designed to look like the 1860s. It's Kara and Juan and Kira doing extraordinary work, laughing their heads off, in a room I wasn't even in.
That's the mission.