hand.gemacht
hand.gemacht opens up a culturally significant class of objects that museum collections do not capture. Their owners refuse to give them up, whether out of emotional attachment or ongoing everyday use. The project is funded by the Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Finanzen und für Heimat under the *Heimat Digital Regional* programme. The Freilandmuseum Oberpfalz hosts the project and is itself run by the Bezirk Oberpfalz. hand.gemacht digitises these objects by 3D scan on site and records motivation, use, and memory at the same time. The work produces an approach to cultural heritage that remains outside the institution's holdings. Its procedure makes the connection between form and meaning reproducible.
Museum collections follow an institutional logic of acquisition, cataloguing and storage. A class of culturally relevant things lies outside this order. Their owners will not or cannot give them up. The objects often remain in active use or are so closely tied to the lifeworlds of their owners that handover to an institution is not feasible. They are present in the regional cultural landscape but barely accessible to research and museum discourse. hand.gemacht has taken this gap as its starting point. The significance of these objects becomes visible precisely in the fact that they cannot be collected.
Each encounter produces two datasets. On site at the owner’s location, the object is captured in three dimensions by 3D scan, including its form, surface and traces of use. In parallel, a qualitative interview documents the layer of meaning. The interview asks about practices of use and about the personal attachments, memories and stories linked to the object. Form and context stand at the end as a coupled pair. Design research provides the methodological frame and treats the relation between material form and lived meaning as a design question. Unikathek, a web application developed in the project, makes this entanglement navigable for research and dissemination.
What emerges is a digital corpus of objects with their meaning attached. The 3D models allow precise formal analysis. The qualitative data anchor the layer of meaning. Unikathek opens the corpus to different modes of access. Researchers can carry out formal and semantic comparisons. In museum work, the objects can be integrated into curatorial threads. For educational contexts, they offer entry points into regional cultural history. The collection grows without any object leaving its place. It forms alongside the lifeworlds it stems from.
Methodologically, form and meaning can be documented together as part of one integrated approach, reproducible and transferable to other research and collection contexts. Epistemologically, the project opens up access to cultural heritage beyond the institutional logic of ownership. The collection shifts from inventory to relational documentation, from the what to the how of cultural meaning. What a collection is when its objects remain elsewhere becomes a question that can be asked anew.