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design myomb notes

Putting together my first collection

Hello! My name is Renata and I started volunteering with Museum in a Box just a few weeks before this little world of ours closed for maintenance.

Starting at Museum in a Box

I started by reaching out to HQ to know a little more about Museum in a Box, and the work that the team was doing in that funky intersection where museum collections, playful education and mixed media hang out. It felt like such a malleable and imaginative idea, like the plasticine of museums. I thought it would be really cool to learn from a project working on how museum content and practices are experienced, made less formal, and shared broadly, and was particularly curious about how sound design and recording enables that.

After meeting George, Charlie and the beauty that is the HQ maker space, I got inexplicably excited about an idea that George mentioned – a collection of everyday noises. I really wanted to be a little part of it, and was immediately so happy to join. I think I found putting together a bunch of noises—something that can intuitively feel so meaningless—making them informative and joyous in their own understated ways to be a fun twist on what we believe museums to be. The idea of creating something with sound as its own nucleus and lowering the threshold for collecting things / making things / being excited about things were simply energising ideas to me.

(Also there was some excellent homemade ginger cake. What’s not to love?)

Why museums and sound?

I love museums as spaces of shared information. It’s really exciting to see how we collect objects: how we think about different materials and shapes and colours and functions, how we celebrate and exhibit objects with different levels of domesticity, the public and the private, the meeting points between intimacy and belonging. It’s a kind of topography almost, all things elevated and grounded, and the energy of both co-existing. Not making the ordinary any more extraordinary, but instead looking after it as its own enriched thing precisely because it is someone’s. Or trying to make sense of that either/or space where things live outside categories. Or when collections go ‘hey, let’s not exist inside a museum, but be somewhere else instead’. I like all of it.

Part of this was growing more and more curious about sound and how it is a portable, shareable, weightless container for information, storytelling, and textures. How sound can be something so familiar and modular, like words and noises in our homes, or something so new and informative, like music and signals from outer space or soundscapes from places we haven’t visited. And at a time like this, where physicality and presence are taking different forms, sound has been everywhere for me – objects that make sound and objects that carry sound, the sounds from the outside like little portals, the sounds and echoes of places we want to return to. I even found myself thinking about how different museum galleries sound, how each has its own base silence. Maybe I’ll make a collection about that?

Making a first collection

I had the joy of putting together a little Box of Noises, recording a few comforting / frustrating sounds at home, and thinking about what I found meaningful about them – the urgency, the softness, the cadence, my lack of descriptive sonic lexicon to precisely talk about each of those samples and resorting to comparisons and other senses to help me through. Got to love a bit of synaesthesia!

https://heart.museuminabox.org/view_collection/462

I learned a few things along the way, which I share with you now. I hope they can help you create your first collection too:

1. Accumulating a lot of samples will probably happen

Hopefully that means you’re enjoying the collection process! For me it was like suddenly I had created a radar for myself – every noise became a discoverable, recordable, at least marginally interesting sound. As simple as this might sound, even the really mundane objects became producers of sound.

I ended up running to my phone a few times to record the sound of something impermanent, re-enacting dish stacking and testing the same bag zipper going up and down an embarrassing number of times. The fact that I was collecting stuff had this almost activation energy about it.

2. Devise a system of organisation / archiving that works for you

This may or may not be your jam, but I found having a dual system really helpful – a manual and a digital one.

Fig.1 – My first plan for the collection: a piece of paper with a speculative list of noises I thought to collect and a grid to help me visualise where to place each illustration. The back of that page had my shopping list for that week. The spreadsheet is my final database of noises, including the room where they were recorded, the number of version for each sound, and the different colours which refer to different collection ideas, placing each sample into one or more collection it could live in. The orange ones made my final selection, with purple and green indicating a strong maybe / let’s save it for a gamified version of secret mystery noises. 

The paper list was first, the pre-recording part. It’s great for lots of brainstorming, and especially good if you like working in non-designated spaces, drawing and making connections between ideas really freely. I adore Excel (conditional formatting would probably feature in my version of My Favourite Things), so I used that as my post-recording organiser. It was great to lay out my samples, select the ones I wanted to use for the Box of Noises and allocate the remaining ones to other collection ideas I had. It was especially good to play around with placing samples in different collections and change things around without disturbing the structure too much or repeating sounds.

3. Lower the entry point for production quality

My biggest inhibition recording sound has always been the quality of my equipment – I don’t own anything immensely professional when it comes to recorders, microphones or audio software. Whilst I do think that a crisp, clean sound makes an enormous difference, it was really refreshing to just confirm for myself that recording with a phone is possible and plenty. I also ended up finding some fun details in my messy, occasionally static, full-of-background samples – subtle birdsong, my feet walking about, fire crackling under a pot full of boiling water. What you intended to record becomes a little more surprising.

I illustrated each sound, and edited my illustrations on PowerPoint and Paint, and using them was, quite simply, pure childlike joy. Using what you’ve got is more than enough.

Calling things things is OK too.

4. Metadata is cool

As the little child who would sketch and take notes at museums (public apology to my mum and dad, and anyone who has ever had the unsolicited misfortune of coming to an exhibition with me), I found the idea of adding my own metadata to be a super cool feature. Although I haven’t yet added any details to my Box of Noises, it creates a really exciting investigative vibe for the whole process. I was suddenly curious about the brand of the kettle, the number of decibels on the fridge beep, the names and numbers of the colours on the pencils I was using. A language of precision became really indulgent. It is also a cool way to make you think about how you might map out an exhibition – what categories would you go for? Would you walk the visitor through your objects chronologically? Or organise your samples according to the different parts of the house where they were recorded? Or flow from samples of natural sounds to samples of mechanical ones? Maybe organise them from softer to noisier materials? So many possibilities!

5. Respond to your own questions by experimenting

This might be the most powerful thing about creating your own sound collection. You have the immediacy to play around with variables, see how the sound changes, record again, try again a little later, satisfy whatever questions pop into your brain by testing things out.

How would the sound of sizzling onions change if I added bigger chunks? How would different faucet openings change the stream of water and its sound? How different are the sound waves and peaks produced when opening and closing doors, packages and strips of Velcro in slower versus faster movements? You can get to really funky variations of the same noise and really isolate what is most interesting about it.

6. Record patterns and collection ideas that come up during the process

I ended up having a bunch of leftover samples, but not in a way that felt wasteful. I ended up wanting to make something with them – future collections, writing prompts, sound effects for future birthday videos I will probably end up making for friends. It was super useful to have a growing list of things I would like to make collections about. Some of them were inspired by common patterns in the sound samples I collected, some were inspired by the objects themselves and the comforting act of meaningfully collecting.

I am working on a collection called Hydrophonics because so many of the sounds ended up being of water in different containers, with different pressures, hitting different materials. I ended up realising that my daily sound production is mostly opening and closing things – doors, packages, fruit, books –, so I’d like to do a little collection solely on Opening and Closing Things. If collections are part of our acts of remembrance, I would like to grieve The Objects I’ve Lost and think of how to showcase objects that simply aren’t here with me anymore. (This is an At Home version of a project we had talked about at HQ back in March, which is cool to think about because it means that we can adapt big ideas into something that can be done from our corners and with our current resources.)

Keep track of all those thought bubbles that appear when you start realising the interesting intersections between your sounds and your objects, maybe it’ll lead you somewhere next.

7. Copyright is funky and a little confusing

I found this part a little tricky.

A good place to start is to record all your own sounds and create all your own illustrations or photographs, so you know you’re not taking any work from anywhere else. That’s also a good way to really explore your own territory of sounds and ideas, and see how enriched it is already.

However, when thinking of other collection ideas, I realised that some of it was going to involve compiling things from other sources, and overlapping some of my thoughts on them. I am still learning how to work with copyright to honour the work of others, and communicate that transparency in the best way possible. I am still not too sure how to best go about it, but I think it is something worth thinking about and referencing as well as possible when putting your collection together. Also, when you create your collection and choose the licensing settings, you can click on the links to find out more about how each type can be used – something I really appreciated!

8. Adapt big things into little things

Putting this collection together was a great reminder that our homes are full of cool things to explore and dignify. We can’t go to museums right now, which means we can be resourceful in other ways and really stretch how far we can go with the concepts of big words like collections, exhibitions, museum, knowledge.

Whatever is accessible to you at the moment can live in a collection. You can make your own collection of cubist drawings or use cardboard boxes to make your own galleries. But mostly, you can turn that V&A exhibition about Disobedient Objects into your own collection of things that you might have used to rebel. Take the idea of a series of archived sci-fi objects into a collection of your favourite ones. Put together some homemade sounds that could be part of a catalogue of sci-fi sound effects. A gallery of world instruments into things that make misleadingly percussive sounds at home. You can use the sounds you are recording to localise those big ideas. If museums are spaces of preservation, it’s like you get to make your own pickles. You can make At Home versions of these huge artistic movements and practices. For example, I have found research to be immensely enjoyable and freeing. I ended up finding out more about pencil manufacturing, Japanese onomatopoeias and different cloud classifications.

One of my favourite things about Museum in a Box is museum and home collections co-exist, at least for now, and I think there is something really grounding about that. 

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archive company news conference design notes

Looking back on 2017

Last year was a huge second year in the life of our small company. I remember meeting my friend Tom for a drink one day, and as I told him about everything, he noted that I’d begun calling us a startup. It’s been a busy, interesting and largely really productive year, and I thought you might like to see all the stuff we’ve done.

Our 2017 goals

I’m a big fan of the dictum “aim low, succeed often.” If you’re able to construct goals that you know you can reach, you might just be more satisfied. We set three goals for the year, and we’ve practically reached all of them. Along three themes: user research, sales, and product design.

  1. Develop educational strategy
    As we’ve talked with more teachers, it’s become much clearer that we need to continue developing and refining our educational strategy. We’re big fans of the idea of 21st Century Skills and Object-Based Learning, and broadly feel like those two themes are a great fit with what we’re hoping to achieve. We’re doing a great pilot deployment with the Education team at Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) in 2018, and that’ll be our first major unattended deployment, in about 10 schools across the USA. We’re looking forward to collaborating with the teachers and students around our general materials, as well as the fabulous SIL content. We also have a list of teachers who’ve expressed interest in joining in the fun. The challenge there is creating enough Brains and Collections to be able to send around!
  2. Sell something
    We’re calling 2017 a big success, largely due to the fact that we’ve completed box commissions with lots of great partners. There’s more information below on these, and how they’ve worked out. We hope to grow our commissions program into 2018 and beyond, not only for income for the company, but to build content that consumers might like to make use of down the track. I also feel personally that, as a small startup, having actual customers differentiates us somewhat from the inflated types of tech startups you might find sniffing around for investment. Even though we’re not exactly profitable yet, having customers is a big win!
  3. Declare Box V1.0
    We’re so close to this, largely thanks to Charlie’s superb CAD skills. We call the container box that sits around the Raspberry Pi and other peripherals (NFC reader, speaker etc) the Skull. We’re nearly at V1.0, which is brilliant. Keep your eyes peeled for a blog post about all that soon.

Things that didn’t quite work or have been difficult

I’ve been struck this year by two major challenges:

  1. We are able to move at light speed compared with the traditional cultural institutions out there. The “sales cycle” )or ability to move quickly on a small purchasing decision) is sometimes months long for museums and libraries, and that’s hurt us a bit, since we’re bootstrapping our operations at this stage.  But, we’re no different from most small businesses in that regard, as cash flow is always a challenge.
  2. It’s often a David vs Goliath dynamic. This mostly relates to work like making agreements with large, old institutions. It takes a lot of energy for a little shop like ours to process and respond to standard terms and conditions from huge organisations. Even though we’ve also been developing our own documents and agreements as templates, it’s very rare that we can engage without also signing a giant contract that’s not especially written for a startup at our stage. And then if we have adaptations or amendments we’d like to incorporate, that takes a long time, too.  I am fantasising about perhaps doing a small conference called David vs Goliath, to discuss and raise consciousness around these challenges, and perhaps even to develop some strategies around mitigation. (Let me know if that sounds interesting!)

There were a few other specific things that were tricky last year too…

  • Science Museum tender – how to measure reach? We were thrilled to be asked to submit a tender around building “Science Capital”, but were essentially overlooked because the (current) cost of sending boxes and objects into schools is very small if compared to the potential of “digital reach”. Our contention, though, is that the quality of the interaction generated by tactile, social interaction is really different from a hit on a website. There’s lots to think through about measuring stickiness and success and engagement with Museum in a Box.
  • Innovate UK – We put our hat in the ring for the 3rd Open Round of funding from Innovate UK. It took ages to put the proposal together, and apparently, we scored a “70” (out of 100?). It was a bit disheartening to see the feedback from the assessors, since it was split 50/50 between “this is a brilliant idea, we should fund it” and “I don’t know how this benefits the taxpayer”. But, the silver lining was that the act of creating the proposal helped us refine our thinking around business models, and how we describe ourselves, which has been useful.
  • Fast hardware iteration – it’s hard not having Adrian in the office with us, but in Liverpool (which I’m sure he’ll never leave!). Even though we’ve made some strides in the design and layout of the Brain, each time there’s an update or a treat from Liverpool, it makes me wonder how much further we could have come, and faster, if we could afford to have this work happen much more. It’s all related to general company cash flow and where to place effort, and again, our commissions are what’s helping us drive all sorts of work forward, so we look forward to more of those into 2018!
  • Software development – Similarly, it’s fast approaching the time when we need a better public-facing UI to help people buy their own boxes, configure them, and even make their own. Finding resource to fund freelance software folks is hard! (And I’ve personally found this part difficult, since my background is in software, and a) I am most useful when I can pair directly with an engineer, and b) I know fairly well how much work there is to do on all this.)

Fleshing out the business plan

As I mentioned, we have a pretty good strategy around how to build out other products, and the three main products we’re thinking about (or selling now) are: Commissions, Make Your Own, and Direct-to-Consumer collections. As we continue to build our commissions portfolio, we also want to package and sell what you’d need to make your own box (object selection, content research/production, and tech stuff). There’s huge demand for Make Your Own from teachers, and we feel like it might tickle the holy grail of actual cross-curricular learning if we can get it right. Then, we’re hoping to allow anyone to buy a Brain and some Collections, and we’d like to design and develop some of those Collections ourselves, to be best-of-breed examples for everyone, and also a possible container for new collaborations with writers, artists and other “agents” all over the place.

There are so many ideas that easily attach themselves to this Museum in a Box idea it can be a challenge to focus on the right next steps! That’s another reason why the commissions are useful to us, because as well as developing the features of the product, we’re also able to do market/user research with our commissioning partners, to learn what they need and want in a partnership like ours.

We’d love to do a first release of Make Your Own mid-2018. That’s a goal and a half for this year!

Boxes

We now have a list of 26 boxes in total in our archive. Some are simple prototypes, like our Statues of Women in London, and others are full-blown commissions. This year, we’ve created 10 new box sets.

  1. Jewish Museum London – a custom-designed box to house 3D prints and postcards remembering Jewish service people in the wars
  2. Healing Through Archives – a brilliant box with archivist, Abira Hussein, exploring “mother tongue” perspectives on Somali objects and audio held at the British Museum and British Library
  3. London Borough of Camden – AHRC-funded program to increase awareness of Camden’s art collection, included several workshops with kids, and culminated in an exhibition which drew together original works, 3D prints with artists’ impressions, and recordings about works made by kids in workshops
  4. Phonics – a prototype idea, to help young people learning to read to understand and sound phonics
  5. How the Ear Works – a quick box Charlie prepared for our pitch to the Science Museum using vintage illustration and audio, and a jigsaw element to help you see all the bits of the human ear
  6. Greek Gods & Goddesses – we’re developing a new product line, where we would like to sell boxes direct to the public, containing engaging narrative and fun 3D/2D materials from institutions around the world already making their collections available for open reuse
  7. Haunted Objects – our visiting summer intern, Michelle, helped put together a first prototype of what a box of scary objects might be. We learned a ton about  bad narratives and what we’d need to do to make this really fun
  8. Climate Change in a Box – a new commission with Jon Christensen, adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and centred on the Los Angeles area, in particular the tar pits at La Brea
  9. Smithsonian!!!!! – Oh, wow! After nearly 18 months in development, we’re just beginning to start on two separate grants with Smithsonian Institution Libraries in Washington DC. We’ll be making 10 boxes to distribute to 10 schools across the USA, and then delivering two different sets of objects to each class, over the course of 4-6 weeks. We’re so excited to connect with the teachers and students who will be using the box, and also curious about building this first step into a much wider deployment!

It’s been really interesting and revealing to see how our commissions (and prototypes) can fit comfortably in the construct that is Museum in a Box. It sounds cheesy to say, but you really can fill this idea with anything that works for you, and we look forward to sealing the deal on our current set of leads for more commissions into 2018, so stay tuned on that!

Brain-raising

photo of skull pieces laid out for constructionWhile we’re still working on getting good names for all the bits, we’ve been calling the hardware that you place objects on the Brain. Therefore, we call the casing of the brain the Skull. We had a ton of fun earlier in the year putting together six new brains, with their skulls, to be deployed for our various commissions, and our use for demonstrations and events and such. We’re looking forward to our next Brain-raising session in January 2018, so if you happen to be in London and interested to come and help out for a day, please get in touch.

Collaborators

Gill Wildman has been a fantastic supporter and design guide for our work this year.  Her incredible experience in listening and questioning and designing for years has been such a useful resource. Thanks Gill.

Ben McGuire has helped us with all our legal challenges this year, and co-developed our agreement docs and thinking around resource re-use and potential for royalties and such with our commissioning partners. Thank you, Ben!

MOO HQ has been a generous sponsor of our endeavours, helping us with printing resources, and expertise around packaging. Thanks to Chad, Phil T, and Richard for everything.

Pango Studios is a company full of talented artists who we’ve sub-contracted to make some of our commissions really sing. Their skills with spray paint and brushes really makes 3D prints look amazing, and we’re looking forward to more! Thanks, Pango! Onwards.

We were pretty clear from the start that we didn’t particularly want to get into the 3D printing business, so were really happy to meet Steve from Amfori, who has helped us with printing this year. He’s also up for doing experiments around materiality, which we’re keen to start on soon.

We’ve also had a ton of student/post-grad visits: Kate Chan, Michelle Wong, Rosie Parker, Lozana Rossenova, Angeliki Symeonidi, Angela Difede. Thanks especially to Michelle for helping design the first instantiation of a Haunted Objects box!

Also thanks to Michelle, for connecting us to Winns Primary in Walthamstow. We really enjoyed our play testing there, and were happy to leave two boxes there for a week to see what the kids did (and what the teachers thought).

Thanks too, to Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, for her continued support of the company, both with offering us speaking gigs ar the brilliant @IoTLondon meetup, and offering us a table at her Christmas pop-up. People really liked Museum in a Box! If only we could sell them one!

Looking forward to some collaborations around inclusion and accessibility in 2018, particularly with Nicolas Bonne and the Tactile Universe program @ Portsmouth University, and Stacy Rowe, geometry and accessible design @ RNIB.

Birds of a feather

It’s both exciting and a bit nervous-making that we’ve spotted other folk doing similar work in the same space, or nearby. Overall, we think this indicates some trending movement back towards tactility and object-based interactions and learning, and gathering different points of view, all of which are central to what we’re doing. It also feels like the race is on!

Work we’ve seen that looks great includes:

Press

photo of the Raspberry Pi magazine on our work table surrounded by boxes and objects and other office detritus

It was a thrill to be picked up and interviewed by some of our friends in the press this year! Even in print, if you don’t mind!

Looking forward…

So, to sum up, our 2018 is looking pretty good already. We’re about to move from Bloomsbury to a new (and more cost-effective!) office in Hoxton. We’re looking forward to more lunch options, and seeing if there are simpatico companies nearby who might like to collaborate on some of the hardware stuff, laser cutting, or even software development!

We’re watching the Young Foundation Academy program with interest. It’s one of the few “accelerators” that has a focus on social good, and importantly, measuring the effectiveness of companies in that sector.

We’re really excited about a possible collaboration with Stacy at the  Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). We’re talking about prototyping a box around geometry, and it just so happens while Stacy is the liaison between RNIB and external companies, she’s also a mathematician with mad skills and a ton of personality!

If we could do a first release of Make Your Own product sometime in the summer that would be Super Fantastic!

And, there are almost too many leads for commissions… this is obviously a good problem to have.

Categories
conference notes

Developing an educational strategy

We’re a core team of designers. We’re not trained educators. While each of us has had quite a bit of exposure to museums, from within and without, and indeed have taught, both kids and adults, with Museum in a Box, we’re trying to improve on a very old idea, of museums’ handling collections being used as learning aids. That’s meant a crash course in the vast landscape of education. Boy, is it HUGE.

Fairly early on, I came up with a matrix-y thing to illustrate what I think are the main segments that our boxes might fit into. You can see it’s a combination of finished or DIY boxes, in a classroom or retail environment.

So, you have a spectrum between a finished box and a DIY box, and you might find one of these in either a classroom, or a retail space like a museum shop.

A finished box might contain objects and their stories that are very directly tied to a specific curriculum area and its learning outcomes. This box might be targeted towards younger students, or at least written/designed for a specific age group or key stage.

A DIY box might be used as a teaching device for slightly older students, perhaps high school age, who are starting to dive deep into design/tech subject areas. In this case, you might not purchase anything physical, but only digital and schematic things. Students would put together the entire thing, from configuring the Brain, to writing the content, to producing the content, to printing the objects, to making the container, etc. We like this approach because the kids could learn a thing or two about history or art or science as they’re constructing a product. It feels like great cross-pollinatory learning, and the teachers we’ve talked about it agree.

You could see either of these boxes also existing in a retail environment. We’d love to make a box to accompany an exhibition, so instead of that spectacularly unsatisfying experience of only being about to buy one or two postcards of what you’ve just seen, you could buy a box that lets you delve deep into every aspect of the exhibition, including perhaps even how it was made. You take it back home and can spend time. We also like imagining this type of box in a pre/visit/post context… maybe the box could be sent to schools before the students visit your museum, so they can be familiar with what they’ll see before they arrive. Once they’ve come and seen things, they could produce their own impressions of it all, and make their Museum in a Box play that instead of the Official Point of View.

Personally, I’m also curious about the collision of Museum in a Box with Design/Tech because, to me at least, it feels like lots of the tech projects out there suffer a little from a lack of content, or that it’s engineering for engineering’s sake? But, then you watch videos of kids making electric guitars with a  micro:bit and maybe that proves me wrong in an instant.

Each of these types of boxes and their associated activities and work leads me to a concept we bumped into in the course of last year. As we were working with Sara Cardello, Education Specialist at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, on a pilot partnership, we discovered the idea of 21st Century Skills. As I understand it, the general initiative was formed in 2002, as a coalition of the business community, education leaders and policymakers who were determined to:

[put] 21st century readiness at the centre of US K-12 education and to kick-start a national conversation on the importance of 21st century skills for all students.

Framework for 21st Century Learning

While there is certainly still emphasis placed on “mastery of fundamental subjects” like English or Maths, 21st century themes are introduced too, around information / media / tech, learning and innovation (and importantly, improvisation), and broader life/career skills.

It’s about setting students on a course to build muscles around things like cogent reasoning, evidence collection, critical thinking and analytical communication, all of which are surely useful when it comes to investigating cultural description and points of view generated in certain context.

  • You can see the skills outlined in the P21 Framework. There’s a ton of documentation on the site too. Lots to explore.

3D Museums: Tactile learning, greater access

Over the last year or so, we’ve also been steadily learning more about object-based learning, and we think it fits in especially well with the overall tenets of 21st century skills, combined with Museum in a Box. Object-based learning is used at the British Museum too, with school groups that come to visit. With thanks to Lizzie Edwards for sharing her knowledge in this area with us.

The main benefits of using objects in learning, according to UCL Museums and Collections, are that they:

  • provide a direct link with a topic or ‘the past’ and can really enhance young people’s interest in and understanding of a topic/subject.
  • encourage learners to use all their senses – especially touch, sight and smell.
  • help to develop the important skill of drawing conclusions based on an examination of evidence, together with an understanding of the limitations and reliability of evidence.
  • are ideal for generating group and class discussion.
  • promote the value of museums and encourage young people to visit museums and galleries with their families to further their learning.

One of the diagrams I found in my research is a handy glanceable thing to help you quickly understand that object-based learning is about asking interesting questions of an object, from lots of different angles… This diagram has been recreated — mostly so it fitted in with the colour scheme of a presentation I was giving! — from the superb report (in PDF format): Learning Through Culture: The DfES Museums and Galleries Education Programme: A guide to good practice (2002)

I presented these rough ideas in Brussels in late November at the Faro’s “Heritage, virtual and augmented” conference. Here are the slides (or a version with presenter notes):

Bright Lights

We continue to research and look to leaders in innovative learning around the world as we ourselves try to learn more about how Museum in a Box can actually help museum educators and teachers, and not hinder them,

We find ourselves studying systems like:

  • diy.org – “DIY is a safe online community for kids to discover new passions, level up their skills, and meet fearless geeks just like them.” Who says education can’t co-exist with creativity??
  • Technology Will Save Us – We’ve been especially impressed by the generosity of the TWSU Education folks. All their stuff in published online, and let me tell you, we’ve been studying it! 🙂
  • AltSchool – “creating a 21st century work environment for our educators”, “supporting, rather than disempowering, with technology”.

There’s a long way to go, but broadly speaking we’re liking the feel of a framework that blends object-based learning and 21st century skills as our starting point.

We’ve already written a job description for an Education Producer – we know it’s a gap – but happily learning about this new, huge environment in the meantime. If you know of a good group or person who might be interested to fund a position like that (maybe a contract to the tune of £10k?) then please tell us who we should talk to!

 

Categories
design notes

Our first branded hardware!

Over the past nine months or so, we’ve been able to show Museum in a Box to hundreds of people, either in our office or at events, and the response has been fantastic.

It’s also been ongoing informal user research, and we’ve had the chance to watch people figure out how to use it. We’ve varied our description of the mechanics and amount of setup, and observed (very casually) little sticking points. One of the main things we noticed is that it wasn’t clear when the Brain was ready to go. The Raspberry Pi 2 takes a while to start up and get ready to read an object, about 30 seconds, actually. So, we’ve added a physical progress bar to the box to help people know when it’s ready. It even says READY!

Adrian soldered the first version, which you can see here. We also adjusted the layout of the box to simplify it a bit. All you really need to know about is power, volume and when it’s ready.

2016-06-08 10.35.162016-06-08 10.35.25-1

And we put a BIG GREEN LIGHT at the end, which is fun.

2016-06-08 13.41.05-1

I’ve also been thinking about what kind of simple instructions we’ll need to include in a box that doesn’t have us driving it. Hopefully something like this, with just three steps would be good.

2016-06-17 14.57.28

And then, Adrian took a very exciting step and ordered us our very own Printed Circuit Board (PCB) to drive the progress bar from now on.

2016-07-08 20.26.49

2016-07-15 16.32.09

It’s possible I’m overexcited about the progress bar, but, I love it!

Categories
notes

Tom posts a video for new Sketchfab feature

Our friends over at Sketchfab just released a fab new feature called depth of field to their 3D viewer. Tom’s a long time member of the Sketchfab community, and was happy to help with a “here’s how you do it” video for everyone.

Nice one, team!

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Big Stuff Arrangements

One of my favourite things about museums in boxes is that whoever is looking at the stuff can arrange them however they like.

Even in our very first version, on the very first day, all we did was arrange the stuff. It was interesting to arrange them by the date they were made, and the date they were acquired by the museum. We also mapped them geographically too.

Here’s the display we made that day:

The Small Museum Version One
Untitled
The Small Museum Version One

We’re working on our first commission – Woo! – and it’s a set of Big Stuff from the British Museum. You can obviously arrange them by size, but also when they were made, and when they were acquired. (Note that the human-sized figure is the box commissioner’s wife, and not part of the British Museum’s collection.)

arrangements

Fun to think about how these sorts of arrangements could be transformed into different information. At the moment, our boxes have a single point of contact, but there could be many. Maybe you can arrange the objects to get different stories.

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Bump. Boop!

I just realised we’d set up this blog way back in March 2015. We had no audience then (and don’t have a very big one now, if we’re honest), so the posts were meant as a bit more internal. They might be interesting to you today, and are something of a rough-as-guts archive, so we’ll leave them up.

Lots has happened with the project since then. Here’s a quick timeline:

  • March 2015 – Box 001: Made at Somerset House, under The Small Museum banner
  • October 2015 – Museum in a Box Ltd. incorporated
  • November 2015 – Box 002: On George’s dining room table, paper prototypes examining form and early interaction design ideas
  • December 2015 – Box 003, 004, 005: For public display at the Remix conference at the British Museum. Website V1 online.
  • February 2016 – Box 006: Our first commission! Big Stuff From The British Museum.
  • February 2016 – Gill Wildman joins our Advisory Board
  • March 2016 – First grant applications begin…
  • April 2016 – Nick Stanhope joins our Advisory Board
  • April 2016 – Our first client training session! Martin, Ash, and Ian from the Postal Museum came to the office for an afternoon, and Tom taught them more about Blender. Ask us about training!

photo of the office and trainees

It’s tremendous fun. We’re a Proper Startup too, bootstrapping everything and keeping day jobs and working it out as we go. Right now, we’re thinking about:

  1. Finishing the commission!
  2. Working directly with teachers in classrooms
  3. Partnering with museums around content / box curation
  4. Getting the brain smaller
  5. Building out web editing UIs to help make new boxes quickly
  6. Fundraising, fundraising, fundraising.

We’ll plan to write lots more to the blog. I’ve been missing blogging about all the stuff that’s happening. Call me old school, I guess?