Month: November 2019

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company news

Abira Hussein joins the Museum in a Box Advisory Board

We’re thrilled to announce that Abira Hussein has joined the Museum in a Box Advisory Board. 

We first worked with Abira back in 2016, when we assisted in developing the “Healing Through Archives” Collection, which she took around to lots of different community spaces and educational settings. It was a brilliant and fun project, gathering and presenting stories told by older women in London Somali communities, and combining them with photographic, sound and music archives from the British Museum and British Library. It was also really our first foray into the development of a Collection where objects were described by people who had used or experienced them, and described in the ‘mother tongue’ (instead of a Professional Expert). Since then, this work has blossomed into her award-winning NOMAD project, developed in collaboration with Mnemoscene.

Abira is a seasoned public speaker and seasoned academic, now undertaking a PhD at UCL entitled The Archive and The Community: using digital technologies and participatory approaches to co-create new archival spaces and knowledge within Somali communities in Britain. She’s also an Associate Producer at All Change and a Research Associate at Culture& and King’s Digital Lab!

She’ll bring a new dimension to our Advisory Board, thanks to her wide-ranging network, expertise in developing social impact projects, deep familiarity with the UK/EU funding landscape, and her reputation and ability to speak truth to power. 

Abira joins our other fantastic advisors: Gill Wildman, Nick Stanhope, and Ben McGuire.

Categories
brain company news design

On the ground at HQ – our 100 Box run is coming together…

It’s been a while in the works, but things are looking very good to build out our biggest run yet: 100 Boxes!

It was our goal this year to figure out how to make 1,000 Boxes, and, well, even though we’ll probably only build 100, that work has allowed us to understand and have a way forward to making Boxes much, much more quickly.

The Skull

Charlie has done the lion’s share of the work associated with making the “skull” or exterior casing of the Box even better. The shape itself has been simplified and optimised so it’s much quicker to assemble. We were lucky enough to have a hardy bunch of volunteers from Verizon Media help us build 100 skulls in a day a few weeks ago. The first time we made skulls, it took about a day to make three.

At the end of the day, you can see 100 skulls made!

The Brain

The Brain is what we’ve always called what’s inside the Box… the electronics. Here is where we’ve done a ton of optimising… and revealing the tech. Before, we would have gathered all the various electronic components from all over the place, from wires to resistors to washers to everything. We assembled them by hand here at HQ.

But now, we have our very own PCB design, largely laid out by Adrian with a few design touches from me, and it’s a thing of beauty, and, importantly, not made by us, but by trained professionals at European Circuits.

George holds the new design in her hands for the first time!

And here’s Charlie turning it on, mere moments ago.

The very best part is that we’re still on our production schedule track to make the 100 Boxes next week, and then SELL THEM ON THE INTERNET.

We have our shop online now, at shop.museuminabox.org, so if you’ve been wanting to buy a Make Your Own kit, or a Museum in a Box tote bag, or even our Greek Gods & Goddesses collection (although you’ll need a Box to play that), now’s your chance!

Be the first to own one of our snazzy tote bags!

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company news

We’re changing our name a little bit: Ltd. to C.I.C.

When we formed the company back in October 2015 – four years ago! – we opened up as a stock-standard company limited by shares. It’s something I had done before – in 1998, in Australia – and a system of governance I am much more familiar with than, say, a charity.

Part of our raison d’être was to do good and make money, and we’ve always had a commercial bent, as our few years of successful commissions with our partners attest. We had also – somewhat naïvely in hindsight, I think – presumed that we could join the ranks of those working towards venture capital investment, but that never felt like a good spiritual fit, and I was always discomfited by conversations with finance folk who were pressing us for the now-conventional strategy to scale, scale, scale.

I think this fetishisation of scale is really destructive and actually antithetical to building a real, profitable bricks-and-mortar business. The ease with which one can scale up a software service cannot be mapped on to a business that makes things. But, that’s another blog post for another time.

The official record!

The thing we wanted to tell you is that we’ve become a Community Interest Company. We got the certificate from Companies House this morning.

If you squint at it, it’s basically the same as a company limited by shares, except there’s an asset lock in place (so if we go under, our assets are passed along to another CIC), and our social purpose (getting cultural education into hard-to-reach places) are now enmeshed in the company’s articles of association. Our purpose is also no longer individual shareholder profit (and frankly, it never really has been, actually), but to state that overtly feels good.

We’re very happy to re-emerge as one of about 14,000 Community Interest Companies in the UK. It’s fun to watch the list of last month’s new registrations… feels like the right crowd to mingle with. And let’s just say we’re eating lots of Celebrations at HQ, and a special thank you to Bee Kelly, who’s volunteering with us at the moment, and helped push through the paperwork.

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company news myomb

What’s this? A new online shop opening soon?

Yes, that’s right! We’re busily preparing ourselves to sell our new Make Your Own kits online! We hope to open up the shop before the end of the year so we can send out early sales before Christmas. It’s exciting to know that some of the kits are already spoken for – headed for a teachers’ association in Spain, and a museum at Harvard, and more places!

outline of the four kits on offer

There’s more info on our new Make Your Own info page, and if you’d like to be notified when we launch it, please sign up for our newsletter!