During visits to German and Polish museums, Marcin Wichary encountered modular industrial dashboards that once managed complex control tasks. At the Deutsches Museum in Munich, he saw a large air-traffic-control display built from interchangeable modules, including a counter unit and a plate that could be flipped to mark something as fixed or in progress. The Fernmeldemuseum Stuttgart housed panels used to monitor subway trains, while Nuremberg’s railway museum showed the same system with removable plates. Stuttgart’s tram museum displayed a panel where DIN typeface clashed with a German‑style Dymo label, and Warsaw’s train museum featured a big toggle for day and night modes. The DASA Museum in Dortmund exhibited a power‑plant control room panel with the greatest variety of modules.
These dashboards functioned as interactive systems through physical switches and lights. In the subway control panels, pressing a button at the origin station and then the destination would set switches along the route, lock it, and “open the signal.” A counter module allowed for tracking quantities, and an annotation plate could be changed to indicate whether something was fixed or in progress. The tactile nature of the dashboards—emphasized by the satisfying “thunk” of a chunky button press—provided user confidence that modern touch screens often lack.
Wichary speculates about the purpose of certain switches, such as a big industrial toggle that might have changed either the panel’s appearance (a dark mode) or its operation, and notes that these physical systems have been largely replaced by software. He reflects on the loss of physicality in modern interfaces, observing that the reassuring feedback of physical buttons is missing in capacitive touch screens, and expresses a desire to understand more about these historical design systems.