Balance Studios
brought interactive fun and learning to help the Cedarburg Cultural Center
(CCC) share its rich history in an engaging and edu-taining way. The CCC has
been preserving the favorite Wisconsin tourist area's history for more than 30
years, and with the help of Balance, is now able to maintain, and more
importantly, continue to share the stories of their community. The Balance team
created an application that highlights the proud community showcasing historic
maps, oral histories, images, and videos in an easy-to-navigate way for guests
at multiple locations throughout the Cedarburg History Museum located in the
community's culture hub.
Balance designed
three kiosks, each with unique content, for guests of the CCC to explore.
Visitors are entertained and educated by the story of the town's beginning and
growth, information about significant people in Cedarburg history, and key
figures involved in preservation efforts. Users select hotspots to learn more
about people, buildings, and events and find oral histories, images, and videos
about their selected subject matter. They can even select keywords to dig
deeper into areas that interest them for seemingly endless content about the
interesting town.
Though the fun
application is smooth and seamless for guests, the kiosks require intense
programming. Balance created a custom Content Management System (CMS) that
features an expansive tagging system to create a user-friendly interface for
administrators to store records in categories, connect them via keywords, and
add customized media content. This solution features a specialized process for
the addition of videos designed to accommodate the long and detailed historical
interviews that the CCC has preserved. Different areas all pull material from
one centrally saved image, audio or video, which preserves space for the
impressive archives. While the creation of the CMS is very complex, the
end-user experience is simple, and allows the administrators to easily add
content so they can focus on telling the remarkable stories of a beautiful
Wisconsin community.