CIMMYT

Pre-opening walkthrough of the finished facility, El Batán, Mexico. Same room, three modes — visitor, museum, and a private VIP environment — on a single hardware footprint.

A 200-square-meter museum and visitor center for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, opened on a hard deadline tied to CIMMYT's 50th-anniversary celebration. The brief asked for three things in the same physical space — visitor center, institutional museum, and a high-tech VIP environment for prospective donors. We built it as a single facility with multiple modes, and open-sourced the back-room software so CIMMYT would never depend on a vendor for the platform.

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Problem

CIMMYT is one of the world's most consequential agricultural research centers , the largest NGO in Mexico, and a core member of the CGIAR global research network. Its work, including Norman Borlaug's Nobel Peace Prize–winning research on high-yield wheat varieties, is part of the Green Revolution story credited with averting mass famines in the 1960s and reducing global hunger from roughly 50% to under 20% over the following decades.

For its 50th anniversary, CIMMYT converted a former office space and lobby at its El Batán headquarters in Texcoco into a 200-square-meter facility that had to do three jobs at once: a visitor center for family and visiting scientists, an institutional museum telling CIMMYT's story, and a high-tech environment for impressing VIP guests and prospective donors. Hard deadline: the anniversary celebration.

The subject matter was scientifically dense — plant breeding, gene banks, the Green Revolution — and had to be handled with rigor for a CGIAR audience while remaining legible to non-expert visitors.

Constraints

• A hard date tied to the anniversary celebration.
• Three audiences in one room.
• Bilingual (Spanish / English) content.
• A 200-square-meter footprint, repurposed from offices and a lobby.
• Cost-effective alternatives to all-digital installations.
• Operable by CIMMYT staff after handoff, with no perpetual vendor dependency.
• A platform that could grow with the institution rather than become obsolete.

What I owned

I owned discovery, UX strategy, and design direction for the entire facility, alongside Museografica's CDMX team. I hired a writer and graphic designers, produced the scientifically accurate large-format botanical illustrations personally, made the decision to open-source the back-room software, and connected the platform decisions to Dublin Core metadata standards from prior experience. Giorgio Agostoni, Museografica's project coordinator, relocated to Texcoco for several weeks to oversee the physical installation.

Key decisions

Treat the brief as a discovery problem. Working with CIMMYT staff during design, the team identified the institution's in-house library and research facilities as rich, largely untapped sources of stories. What had been conceived as a standard institutional exhibit became closer to a curatorial undertaking — content enough to fill a book.

Hybrid, not all-digital, for the front room. The front room carried a 10-meter historical narrative. We solved the scale problem with touchscreen monitors combined with backlit color transparencies, creating the visual impression of a single 10-meter continuous screen — at a fraction of the cost of an all-digital equivalent.

Make every back-room surface interactive. A large multi-touch map table showed CGIAR's worldwide programs, searchable and filterable by country, region, or program type. Data updated nightly to prevent interruptions during visitor hours. Two walls of multi-touch screens carried Harper's Index–style factoids, the story of how maize hybrids are developed, and other timely narratives.

Build a hidden VIP mode rather than partition the space. A secret touch trigger on the map table transforms the entire back room into a director-driven, immersive presentation environment. It’s the same hardware, same room, and a completely different experience mode for when a major donor or VIP partner is present. No separate infrastructure, no additional budget — the three-audience problem solved by building modes into the system rather than segmenting the space.

Open-source the back-room software. Too many institutions are left with broken, unmaintainable interactives they can't afford to fix, don't know how to repair, or simply watch grow dated and sad. The goal wasn't just to deliver a product; it was to build infrastructure that would survive, be maintainable, and remain "living" after the engagement ended. The platform decisions connected naturally to Dublin Core metadata standards — a foundation for long-term content management and institutional control rather than vendor dependence.

What changed during the work

The hardest moment wasn't the build. It was a facilities manager on the client side who proved a persistent challenge throughout the project — disputes over installation standards and details became a recurring friction point that consumed significant time and energy.

CIMMYT approached Museografica two years later about a Phase 2 development. We declined with genuine regret, because the same facilities manager was still in place. The work was strong enough that the client wanted more. The working relationship wasn't sustainable enough to continue.

Outcome

• Opened on time for the 50th-anniversary celebration. VIP guests from CGIAR partner organizations attended alongside staff and families, with speeches and a ribbon cutting — and a director visibly surprised that the large-format botanical illustrations had been produced personally by the head of Museografica.
• Three audiences, one facility, solved by building modes into the system rather than segmenting the space.
• Hybrid 10-meter front-room display at a fraction of all-digital cost.
• Multi-touch back-room infrastructure with a CGIAR worldwide-programs map table, two walls of interactive screens, nightly data updates, and a hidden VIP/donor mode.
• Back-room software open-sourced — the V1 precedent for what is now being formalized as Sinthius, an open-source framework for museum digital-exhibit longevity.

Reflection

What I'd do differently: more explicit protocols for handling stakeholder friction from the outset — and earlier work with the client to align on how relationship tensions would be managed and escalated. Identifying operational gatekeepers like facilities managers as key stakeholders during the discovery phase, not treating them as implementation details, would have changed the dynamic significantly.

The lesson isn't about the conflict. It's about the mapping: who has the power to make the build phase painful, and how do you build the relationship before you need it.

The same principles that made the CIMMYT installation durable — explicit data models, open-sourced software, transparent provenance, low vendor lock-in, designed-for-handoff — are the same principles that make AI-inflected workflows trustworthy in regulated environments. The user is an expert. The data is high-stakes. The system has to remain inspectable years after the launch team has moved on. That's the same job whether the institution is a research center, a bank, or a court.