Beyond the Feed: Michelle Excell on Building a Social Network for Discovery
The sound of Voiijer company ringing the technological bell to the people around nature, the impact of global warming on people’s choice of interaction with nature through technology. The co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Voiijer, Michelle Excell, is at the center of redefining one’s interaction with nature through technology.
Voiijer is a social platform that minimizes scrolling and likes and emphasizes exploration, storytelling, and significant interaction with the environment. Excell’s expertise in creative and immersive technologies, including augmented reality and AI, gives her a unique advantage in combining digital experience with real-world curiosity.
Michelle’s vision to bring the great outdoors back into people’s digital lives and vice versa is grounded in reality, where urban lifestyles and mainstream social media trends have detached many from nature. This interview reveals how Voiijer is opening up a niche within the tech ecosystem for scientists, explorers, and anyone passionate about discovery.
From Vision to Reality: Excell’s Path to Voiijer
Michelle Excell’s career track took off in New Zealand, where she entered digital design in the early 2000s. She subsequently moved on to the field of advertising, then set up her own consultancy in San Francisco specializing in futuristic experiences like VR and AR.
Her work was international, linking her up with scientists and innovators; such encounters would prove beneficial later on in setting the design principles of Voiijer. The notion of Voiijer was born when Excell got together with the other co-founder, Michael Barth, again. Barth, a seeker or explorer, had been working in the Mongolian Gobi Desert, where the challenges of sophisticated data collection and storytelling were prevalent.
The realization that there wasn’t any central and intuitive tool for explorers to document and spread their findings ignited the invention of a completely new platform which was to be constructed as per the whims of the scientists, adventurers, and nature lovers of the world.
What Is Voiijer?
Social media giants that promote rapid content turnover have no chance against Voiijer, which is all about deep, multimedia storytelling. Users can take not only pictures and videos but also sound recordings, writing, marking with GPS, and also making 3D scans, all of this together forms a single narrative flow called a “Voiij.” The Voiijs help other people to experience the trips and discoveries in a more involved manner, and the experience is more educational than just looking at regular social media posts.
Excell says that offering these tools together was a deliberate decision: while traditional social networks divide the content, the exploration and scientific documentation often require rich, multimodal context to be understood at all. Voiijer serves that need by merging collection and narrative, so that the finding and its account happen at the same spot.
Designed for More Than Just Professionals
Voiijer was primarily designed for scientists and professional explorers, but Excell emphasizes that it is also suitable for anyone who is curious or loves nature. The platform accepts bird migration tracking, local geology research, or simply sharing a walk through a forest, and it is even open for all levels of experience to contribute. This way of working reflects the opinion that exploration is not only for experts but also for a common human urge to discover.
Even more, the collaboration features increase the reach of the platform. Users have the option to invite people to work together with them on their Voiij, which means that a group can actually work together in an expedition or research project documenting through Voiijer. The combination of personal storytelling and shared documentation is what makes Voiijer different from other platforms that mainly focus on individual content feeds.
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