Brew your own beer, a multisensory museum installation
Aesthetic experience design for the National Museum of Denmark
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Brewing pot installation glowing with coloured light and rising mist
- Client
- National Museum of Denmark - SUMO research centre
- Context
- Designing Aesthetic User Experiences, IT University of Copenhagen
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Software developer
- Team size
- 6
- Tools
- Arduino Nano · RFID · Addressable RGB LED · Ultrasonic humidifiers · Python · Laser cutting · User testing
- Contribution
- Team of 6, original idea, first prototype and all the programming
A physical installation for a travelling museum caravan, where visitors brew a conceptual beer by choosing ingredients with their hands. Nine RFID-tagged ingredient jars, being three malts, three hops and three yeasts, give 27 possible combinations, each producing a personalised taste card.
The brief
The National Museum's SUMO research centre is building a caravan installation that will travel to sites around Copenhagen, and our assigned theme was the brewery in Carlsberg City. This meant the task was to communicate cultural heritage through a multisensory experience rather than through a screen.
Designing for the hands and the nose
The central object is a brewing pot with light, mist and sound, where visitors smell and read about the ingredients and then choose which ones to add based on preference. Each jar carries an RFID chip, and placing it in the scan area sets the LED strip to the matching colour, so that the pot responds immediately, while ultrasonic humidifiers run continuously in order to make it look and feel like it is boiling. The outcome is one of 27 conceptual beers, delivered as a taste card that the visitor takes home, which allows the experience to extend past the visit itself.
How it was built
An Arduino Nano coordinates the RFID reader, an addressable RGB LED strip and three ultrasonic humidifier modules, and it talks to a laptop over serial in order to trigger a Python script that renders the brewing process and generates the taste card. The ingredient jars and the pot components were laser cut.
What testing showed, including what failed
We tested on demo day with observation, video and a survey, and the sensory elements worked, since the steam made the pot read as genuinely boiling, the laser-cut parts smelled stronger than expected and became part of the experience, and the immediate colour change made the system feel alive. Smell scored 8.3 and visuals 7.7 out of 10. However the interaction did not work as designed, since almost every visitor tried to place the ingredient straight into the pot without scanning it first. This is due to the scanning step having no affordance, and users' instincts telling them that placing the jar should be enough, which broke the flow repeatedly. Furthermore the screen was larger than planned and pulled attention away from the pot, which undermined the point of an embodied experience, while the audio was too long and too dense to follow in a noisy room.
What I'd change
Here I would put an NFC reader under each ingredient spot and delete the scanning step entirely, shorten the audio, and give the pot enough feedback that the screen becomes supporting rather than primary. Furthermore I would make it adaptive, so that visitors can restart and experiment rather than being pushed through the same fixed tempo.
What I owned
Software developer in a team of 6. The original idea and the first prototype were mine, I built the digital application and all the programming, and we developed the concept together.
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The brewing pot and ingredient scanning screen set up and ready on demo day
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Close-up of the addressable RGB LED strip and ultrasonic humidifier modules before assembly
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Three pot enclosure iterations side by side: cardboard, laser-cut lattice, and the final steel pot
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A printed taste card showing the resulting conceptual beer profile