Creating an immersive digital chat experience to talk to your future self.

The Design Museum came to us with an idea for extending their Designing for Your Future Self exhibition beyond the physical space.

The exhibition explored how design can help people live fuller, healthier and more connected lives as they age. They wanted a digital experience that could take those themes and make them personal, giving visitors a way to think about their own future rather than simply observe it.

We worked with the Design Museum to turn that idea into an interactive experience delivered somewhere their audience was already comfortable having conversations: Instagram.

Designing for Your Future Self challenged some of the assumptions we make about ageing and asked visitors to consider what they might want and need from the world around them as they get older.

Our challenge was translating that thinking into a conversation.

Rather than building another standalone website or asking visitors to download an app, we wanted the experience to feel immediate and accessible.

Instagram gave us that opportunity.

The idea was to create a chatbot that could guide somebody through a series of questions about themselves, their priorities and how they imagined their future, before using their answers to give them something personal to take away from the experience.

Turning exhibition themes into a conversation

We started by understanding the themes behind the exhibition, the Design Age Institute's research and the questions the experience wanted people to consider.

From there, we designed a conversational flow that gradually encouraged users to think about their future selves.

Instead of presenting information in the same way as the physical exhibition, the chatbot asked questions and responded to the choices people made along the way.

The challenge was getting the balance right. The experience needed enough structure to tell a meaningful story, while still feeling like a conversation rather than a questionnaire.

We used a combination of predefined conversational paths, natural language processing and generated content to make interactions feel more personal and playful.

Building the experience inside Instagram

We developed the chatbot using Meta's platform and integrated it directly with the Design Museum's Instagram account.

Users could begin the experience through Instagram and move through a guided conversation without leaving the platform.

As they progressed, the chatbot asked questions, responded to their answers and introduced ideas connected to the themes of Designing for Your Future Self.

At the end of the journey, those answers were brought together to give the user a personalised objective: something designed to encourage them to think differently about their future and what they could do today to shape it.

The experience could also direct people towards relevant exhibition content, research and events, creating a bridge between the digital conversation and the wider work happening at the museum.