April 2016 – Museum in a Box

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:

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.

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!

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:

Finishing the commission!
Working directly with teachers in classrooms
Partnering with museums around content / box curation
Getting the brain smaller
Building out web editing UIs to help make new boxes quickly
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?