“À la carte” is a present for the visitors of the “Kosher & Co.” exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin deploying RFID technology.

Before entering the exhibition each visitor receives a spoon from a host. The exhibition itself consists of ten rooms each dedicated to a different aspect of food and religion. While wandering through the exhibition the visitor finds a plate in each room, decorated with an illustration related to the current section. To make clear that both spoon and plate belong to each other a consistent design is used. When the visitor puts their spoon on a plate, the plate illuminates accompanied by a tinkle sound representing that a recipe is collected. At home the visitor can access their personal cook-book of collected recipes via internet.

“A la carte” deploys RFID technology. In order to make the use of this invisible technology a pleasurable experience we designed a system which consists of RFID tags embedded in spoons, RFID reader under each plate combined with an audiovisual feedback and a general system tracking all user-activity and collecting it in a database. An ID Number on each spoon gives access to the personal database/cook-book which was created during the visit.

“A la carte” is part of a hands-on research into how RFID technology can be used for position-sensitive and context-sensitive informational systems in museums. “A la carte” is developed by The Green Eyl for the Jewish Museum Berlin in collaboration with the “Poseidon” research group (Humboldt-University, Berlin and Berlin University of Applied Science).

Further work for this exhibition: Whispering Table and Creeping Things