Museum Schaffen Winterthur, Switzerland
Wintidings (2025)
For the exhibition “ObjektWerkStadt,” historical machines from the Haldengut brewery receive their own profile, personality, and voice.
One especially vivid detail from the media coverage shows how playful Wintidings is: in the free web app, visitors can even chat with the invented woodworm Charlie. Historical objects and their stories become distinctive characters, both in the museum and from home.
What makes this project special
- The exhibition uses an object casting: only the most popular machines later move into the “Haldengut Memory Tank.”
- Characters like Charlie the woodworm, Brunhild, Yeastina, Silo Sepp, and Rosy give even restoration work and industrial history a distinct voice.
- Visitors chat directly with the exhibits and help decide which objects will appear in the follow-up exhibition.
- The app combines entertaining storytelling with concrete industrial history around the Haldengut brewery.
Practical experience
What convinced Museum Schaffen in day-to-day use
“What convinced us above all was the multifunctionality of Mein Objekt: it is not just an object chat, but also a smart multimedia guide.”
Access
Browser-based, no download required, and accessible even outside museum opening hours.
Editorial workflow
Audio, video, and dialogue content could be created by the institution itself in a comparatively short time.
Participation
Workshops create content together with different target groups and strengthen the relationship to the objects.
Full experience report
At Museum Schaffen in Winterthur, more than 2,500 objects from the former Haldengut brewery are competing for their future. In the preliminary exhibition “ObjektWerkStadt,” Mein Objekt was tested extensively and used as a voice for these objects.
For the chats, the team consistently relies on storytelling: every object receives its own personality and responds directly to visitors. After a short onboarding phase, the Chatbuilder is described as intuitive, with no coding skills required.
The team found it especially helpful that it could send images, add selfie prompts, and embed videos, audio, and short texts directly in the app for each exhibit.
The content was created in-house in a comparatively short time. In workshops and collaborations, Museum Schaffen also uses the app to develop dialogues, names, characteristics, and spoken texts together with different target groups.
Museum Schaffen also describes the collaboration with Homo Ludens as constructive and collaborative. From the team’s point of view, every new institution contributes to the ongoing development of Mein Objekt.