This morning over coffee at home, I wrote a personal tweet: “I wonder what will happen today.” I didn’t post it.
I got to work a bit before 10am. Our office hours are 10-6. Our first thing to do was an interview with Pat, a design/construction teacher at a high school in Liverpool. He’s one of our Make Your Own pilots, and it was a joy. We’re planning to talk with all 40 of them.
We have a script for these interviews, which Pat promptly diverted from. He explained his love of teaching, and that every child is a maker, and that when kids are able to teach other kids what’s going on you know they’ve really got it. He spun his phone around his classroom, and showed us what basically looked like his shed. In the best way. There’s a welder, 3D printers, workshop timetables… all manner of bits and bobs designed to help kids think and touch and make. One of our questions is ‘what sort of collection are you thinking to make?’ and Pat’s desk is covered with widgets, that people mostly just want to touch and pick up, so he explained he wanted to make a Collection using those widgets, to help people learn what all the things are. Brilliant.
Then, we finalised an agreement for a new bunch of 3D scanning and digital model making we’re going to do for a big London museum. We’re going to their store tomorrow to check it out.
Next, our two new team members, Thibaut and Amy, and I went through our sketch of what the Make Your Own kit we’ll be sending to all our pilots consists of, discussed each element, and started to flesh out a content plan for the thing. It’s an interesting line to tread, between instructional, educational, proscriptive, and suggestive. Our pilots are all sorts: primary school classes all the way to world-leading sound artists. Our challenge will be to make a kit that experienced adults can skim for the key elements and that teachers can use to guide and stimulate their students. It’s a first pass representing our own production process so others can use it, with a view to making a kit that anyone can use.
By then we were hungry, so got shish, falafel and noodles and sat in the park, in the warm October sun. (What?)
We had guests coming to tea, so I went to Sainsburys to get some angel cake, Tunnocks caramel wafers, and digestives.
Around 2pm, I joined a Skype call with Sara and Liz in Washington, at the Smithsonian. Our calls, while always focussing on next steps and progress, are always filled with laughter and lots of jokes. It was funny introducing Thibaut and Amy to the style of “business meeting” we’ve had with the Smithsonian folks for almost two years now, every week. They are true partners, and real friends. Schemes continue.
Next I talked to an insurance broker who I’d never met and knew nothing about us, who asked me the sort of new and neutral questions I generally enjoy, probing for the edges of our operation in the hope of describing it adequately for potential providers. It turns out we’ve built a small but international business with a growing network of collaborators and other service providers so that’ll probably be complicated and expensive. Ho hum.
Sara and I had been interviewed the week before by a video press blog in Los Angeles who liked what Museum in a Box is and was going to make an article about us. I wrote to them to ask how it was going, and they told me the video piece was already online. I watched it, and so have 116,000 other people by now. WTF. Great! (That explains the influx of hello emails we got on Monday from teachers in the USA who would all like boxes please.)
Then our afternoon guests arrived, Lucia and Martin, both part of our pilot. It’s lovely that we can meet the London pilots in person, and, over cake, we followed more or less the same script we asked Pat about in the morning. The three stories are each so different, but all united by our simple thing. It’s fascinating how each person has taken the idea and is running with it.
What is a Museum? How might this change it? How could this create a new way to enjoy sound? Could this encourage new collaborations within our museum? Is a Box better than the laptops we have in our Learning Centre? What if the kids pull it apart? We visit museums 2–3 times a year and the kids have to pay a bit of money for that. Wouldn’t it be great to get a sponsor to help with the pilot?
It’s such a thrill to be engaging with our pilots like this. Having thought and dreamt about Museum in a Box in relative isolation for a while now, this user research and conversations we’re having are enlightening and exciting, especially for me, because they’re making me see what we’re making from new points of view. It’s refreshing and inspiring, and there’s another 36 or so to go.
Oh, and, got a note from a chap in Singapore who wants to tinker with a Box to make a series of talking artefacts about Sikh Heritage.
The thing is, when you’re trying to make something new, every day is different, and this was a good one.
