Manoominike is a bilingual exhibition at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum exploring Manoomin as food, habitat, language, and living cultural practice. Developed with Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and museum teams, the experience moves visitors through history, ecology, gathering, processing, and community knowledge within the museum’s timber-framed West Loft.

The content was dense, bilingual, and culturally specific, yet the gallery required immediate visual orientation, accessible reading heights, clear long-to-close viewing layers, and continuous flow across irregular freestanding walls. The design also had to coordinate photography, maps, captions, quotes, QR content, projection, and production constraints without reducing the subject to a conventional panel display.

A spatial route was built through changing colour zones, full-height landscape imagery, oversized titles, illustrated processing gestures, raised content cards, and a continuous pathway graphic. Visitor reading strategies guided hierarchy at long, mid, and close distances. Full-scale layouts, 3D simulations, material tests, and on-site coordination aligned the system with fabrication, wallpaper limits, overlaps, corners, accessibility, and bilingual copy fitting.

The finished exhibition transforms the West Loft into a coherent visual journey while preserving moments for quiet reading and reflection. Distinct zones help visitors recognize place, process, people, and cultural continuity, while projection and wall graphics connect the exhibition into one environment. The installation also established a production-ready workflow linking interpretive design, technical detailing, fabrication, and on-site problem solving.