Nine fully produced editorial pages honoring the cultural interviews at the heart of Phase II. Built to grow well beyond the project's close.
Stories of Place began as a course correction. The original Phase II plan placed cultural interview content inside virtual tour hotspots — accessible, but buried. The interviews Bobby Camara and Hannah Kihalani Springer had given deserved more than hidden links inside a 360° viewer. I pitched a dedicated editorial section instead. NELHA agreed. Each page combines video, photography, blockquotes, illustrations, and connected story navigation into a full editorial experience. Seven stories with Bobby Camara, two with Hannah Kihalani Springer — covering the origins and structure of Pāʻaiea, the 1801 Hualalai eruption, the moʻolelo of Pelehonuamea's arrival to Kona, the marginal lands of Kekahawaiʻole, Hawaiian aquaculture, natural history, and kuleana. The section was built with a CMS structure designed to receive new stories long after the project closed.
The primary challenge was information architecture — how to structure content that was irreplaceable, culturally sensitive, and needed to be both beautiful and indexable. Burying it in a virtual tour would have made it invisible to search engines and difficult to share. Building it as a standalone editorial section solved both problems. Each page required original layout decisions since no two interviews covered the same ground or had the same visual assets available. Connected story navigation at the bottom of each page keeps readers moving through the archive rather than dead-ending.
Selected pages from the Stories of Place editorial section on hostpark.io.
