Over the past couple of years, the world has witnessed a horrific rise in anti-Asian sentiment. And amid the negative rhetoric around the origins of the coronavirus, Sydney’s Chinatown was left reeling. An area once buzzing with character and community, was deadly quiet. Decades-old businesses closed, tourism declined, and Chinatown’s rich cultural legacy was at risk.

Galvanised by these changes, we reached out to MOCA (the Museum of Chinese in Australia). A new museum based in Sydney’s Chinatown, due to open in 2023, we were briefed to help accelerate their next chapter.

Our ambition was simple: to promote the ingenuity, contribution and resilience of Chinese Australians past, present and future.

We wanted to honour the past, present and future, and move away from traditional ideas of museums. The website that acts as an evolving digital museum, collecting crowdsourced stories of home to build community, prompt engagement and fundraise.

Online, MOCA is powered by a scalable design and tech solution, enabled by partnering with Contentful, an API-first headless CMS. Designed and built on a responsive grid, content seamlessly comes to life with atomic components – building blocks that can be reconfigured to continually evolve the experience. The content architecture allows for digital solution scaling into new territories, building a foundation for the future.

To build anticipation before opening, we created an interactive pop-up exhibition, Stories of Home, in the yet-to-be transformed space, and invited the community to meet the reimagined MOCA. Marrying the physical with the digital experience, it was designed to inspire, fundraise and encourage individuals to tell their stories – a museum from the community, for the community.

More than a brand refresh, this project used the power of design to help reframe a narrative. Our hope is that MOCA becomes a place to influence and reimagine our stories, and shape what comes next.

Key to the success of this project was building a team diverse in heritage, experience and expertise. From visual and verbal design, experience design and technology teams across R/GA Sydney, Singapore, Indonesia and New York, to using suppliers and talent with predominantly Chinese Australian heritage, this was a truly collaborative project with inclusivity and diversity at its core.