Indigenous Science Mixed Reality Exhibit
wallitka: The Place of the Tule Boat
wallitka (WAHL-eet-kah, “The Place of the Tule Boat” in Chochenyo) is an interactive mixed reality exhibit planned for the Lawrence Hall of Science, co-created with the East Bay Ohlone community, a Native American people of the San Francisco Bay Area. Through a multi-year co-design process, community members learned and passed on Indigenous ecological knowledge and mixed reality technologies, and translated their worldview into the exhibit’s interaction logic, inviting the public to experience the Ohlone ecological perspective through embodied, collaborative play.
The exhibit invites visitors to navigate a tule boat, a traditional Ohlone watercraft, together through a “tule boat metro system” in a speculative Indigenous futurist vision of the East Bay, where colonization never occurred and natural and Indigenous cultural abundance remain intact. Along the way, visitors encounter native animals and natural phenomena, and offer abalone shells in exchange for stories that share Indigenous knowledge. Through these interactions, visitors learn ecological knowledge while being immersed in the Ohlone worldview of animism and reciprocal relationships with the land and more-than-human beings.
The final exhibit is currently a work in progress.
Role /
HCI Designer
Prototype Developer
Community Workshop Designer + Facilitator
Team /
Ari Krakowski, Jedda Foreman, Kimiko Ryokai, Sarah Olsen, Devin A. Cavero, Vincent Medina, Louis Trevino, Deirdre McDonald Greene, East Bay Ohlone Community, Yuqi Tian, Jiaqi Zhang
Year /
2027 (Planned)
Location /
The Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley, California, United States
Co-Design Prototype
Co-Design Process
Final Exhibit Concept Design
The interaction is grounded in the Indigenous concepts of animism, reciprocity, and a gift economy. Instead of accumulating rewards by checking in at multiple locations, visitors must first offer an abalone shell to each native animal, or to the fog, before receiving a story about the Native land, as illustrated in the storyboard above. The interaction thus embodies a reciprocal logic of “giving before taking” and recognizes the personhood of nonhuman beings.
Proposed wallitka BART System
Proposed Storyboard (Work in Progress)
