Museum of Communication — Attraction in Bern

Fantastic place filled with many interesting and sometimes interactive exhibits. Write a message on paper, put it into a container and send it through a tube using pressurised air. In a booth there are clips from movies in which there's miscommunication. This is all very funny and has a clear connection to communication. These are also larger exhibits, like a perfectly restaurated post carriage or the car used in a legendary robbery. But many exhibits are put there behind glass without apparent intent, like on a scrapyard. For example the first eletronic computer built at the ETH or the large punch card calculator donated by the Swiss federal railways. They just stand there with few lines of text that do not even explain what these machines were used for or what their predecessors and their successors were. Without telling the purpose of these artefacts it's pointless to put them on display. I know there are audio-guides, but I despise those things. If this is a museum for communication, it should be able to find a more innovative and enjoyable way of communicating with its audience. And the staff also seemed to be exhausted from trying to explain all this to the visiting masses on a rainy Sunday. As you enter the museum, it was unclear to me how far in which direction it extends. After wandering on the ground floor room for a long time I realized there's also things in the two lower floors. This was almost the larger part of the museum! And I'm also not sure if there wasn't some wing of the building on the ground floor I missed. So it would be very important to have a transparent 3D model of the exhibitions right at...

We have visited this museum when our kids were 4; they liked it then but they especially found it interesting now. There were certain hits, like sending messages via letter shoot, sorting letters instead of the machine, making stamps with your own picture that you can actually use to send letters in Switzerland, playing some games like Multitasking and Hacking, figuring out how to actually use a telephone 😁 (that one was a stumper, especially when I kept saying “hang up” and they had no idea what hanging up meant 😜!) The kids didn’t think the current exhibition called Nothing is interesting, but I certainly did. It is an excellent exhibition showing how nothing is always actually something. We stayed for a couple of hours but we could have stayed more but the place was packed with school children and it was a bit tricky getting around. Probably the best time to visit is not during rainy days, but once it’s sunny and nice. Then you get the museum all to yourself and you can try and do whatever your heart desires. The stations are not in any order so you can do them however you want, but the ground level seems to be the most interesting for children. Downstairs there are stamp collections from the entire world and upstairs is the Nothing exhibition. I found something interesting on each level and I’d surely go again. What could improve the experience is if maybe there would be some order or suggestion of what to see first (this for the adults, not for the kids) but I know I could have used maybe some guidance as to what to do first. But it’s a cool place, there is something for everyone...

Personally, I was very disappointed with this museum; fortunately, as I had purchased a Berne Museum Pass - and there are so many museums and galleries to choose from - I was able to limit my stay here and move on to alternative venues without feeling that I had wasted time and money. A significant percentage of the exhibits are interactive - not of course a bad thing in itself. When I went, the museum was being used almost exclusively by families with children playing (and perhaps learning?) on the exhibits. However, for adult visitors I found the content uninteresting, aside perhaps from a few panels explaining particularities of communication history relevant to...