Musa Is Adi’s 3D Avatar. She Will Guide Visitors Through Milan’s Design Museum

For more than a decade, AR in museums has often remained a limited addition. Adi Design Museum, however, is trying to go a step further with an interactive digital avatar that guides visitors, displays objects in 3D, suggests personalized routes, and integrates historical content. For at least a decade, contemporary museology has been talking about augmented reality through experimental projects, dedicated apps, interactive installations, and QR codes that promised to make museum visits more immersive, engaging, and accessible. Often, however, these technologies have remained “additional” tools, coexisting alongside the traditional museum experience without significantly altering it. AR has frequently been treated as a simple layer superimposed on physical reality: surprising, certainly, but unable to fundamentally transform the relationship between object, exhibition space, and visitor.

Adi Design Museum in Milan enters this conversation with a project that experiments with a different approach. “Vivere il Design” introduces a digital avatar in augmented reality designed to present the museum’s collection. The initiative merges physical and digital space into a single ecosystem where every object, project, and story becomes accessible, explorable, and interactive. The avatar is called Musa. She appears as a young woman with short, light-colored hair and was developed by Engitel and Why together with 3D Produzioni. Musa acts as a “living” interlocutor: she answers questions, adapts the visit according to visitors’ interests, suggests multimedia content, and guides audiences through the Compasso d’Oro Collection and the history of Italian design.

Andrea Cancellato, Director of Adi Design Museum

“More than a chatbot, she is a tool designed to make the museum’s cultural heritage accessible and engaging, especially for younger generations,” explains Elena Schiaffino, co-founder of Engitel. “The system combines face, voice, and lip synchronization with natural response times and is based on a fundamental principle: grounding, which limits every answer exclusively to the certified content of the Adi archive.”

The project’s main innovation therefore does not lie in replacing human guides, but in expanding their role. A traditional audio guide is linear and unidirectional, delivering predefined content. Musa, by contrast, transforms storytelling into a dynamic and participatory experience. She can propose different routes based on visitors’ choices, display objects in 3D, activate videos and interviews, and integrate information from the museum’s digital archives.

The experience begins at the entrance, where an interactive totem introduces new exploration modes and invites visitors to engage with 3D representations of the objects on display. Tablets and mobile devices placed throughout the exhibition allow each project to be explored in greater depth, revealing details that would otherwise remain invisible in a conventional museum setting. Iconic objects such as Olivetti’s Lettera 22, awarded the Compasso d’Oro in 1954, Achille Castiglioni’s Mezzadro stool, Cini Boeri’s Strips armchair, and Vico Magistretti’s Eclisse lamp become interactive scenarios where visitors can consult annotations, technical information, and multimedia materials connected to the museum’s digital infrastructure.

Andrea Cancellato, Director of Adi Design Museum

“This project,” says Andrea Cancellato, Director of Adi Design Museum, “represents an opportunity to expand our language and enrich the story of the design heritage we preserve and promote. Design is timeless by nature, and thanks to this new tool it can engage with the present and connect with younger generations.”

The project also includes rare and previously unpublished materials from the archives of 3D Produzioni. Interviews with some of Italy’s most influential designers recount the origins of objects that have shaped both the history of the Compasso d’Oro and everyday life in Italy.

The adoption of avatars and immersive technologies opens up new possibilities for accessing cultural content. In this context, human guides can devote more attention to cultural mediation, audience engagement, and contextual interpretation. Moreover, the digital experience is scalable: multiple visitors can interact with Musa simultaneously, while content can be updated in real time and expanded continuously, without physical or logistical constraints.

Opening image: The Avatar Muse, Milan, 2026. Courtesy Adi Design Museum