Author: Adrian McEwen

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conference

Speaking at Rise and Design

Adrian was in Newcastle recently to attend Rise and Design – Design in the Heritage Sector. He gave a talk about Museum in a Box and how it’s being used round the world; his slides and notes (so what he was intending to say, not necessarily what he ended up saying) are here…

Doing Design Without Glowing Rectangles
An array of red printed circuit boards

Hello. I’m Adrian McEwen. I run MCQN Ltd, a small studio in Liverpool that makes electronics and software and connected devices.

We make products of our own, more on that later, and work for others…

A yellow Lancia Integrale is parked in a farmyard next to a barn and a pair of large metal food silos. Everything is dusted in a light layer of snow

That might be some sensors in a chicken food silo on a farm…

An air quality sensor mounted on a post in the shadow of a motorway overpass

Or air quality sensors to remotely monitor pollution…

A blonde wood and black perspex radio sits on a wooden table next to a lamp

Or an experimental radio for the BBC.

A tetraptych showing four views of the Poppy artwork: two of the bed of growing poppies, and two (front and back) of the laser-cut wooden box holding a time-lapse camera

Some of our clients are in the heritage sector.

For Ordsall Hall in Salford we put some sensors in a bed of poppies and had them tweet their conditions as they grew

Close up of the printing section of a teleprinter

And for Western Approaches in Liverpool we’ve built a new interface for their old Second World War teleprinters so it can communicate with a modern computer

A collection of objects (including a tiara, ancient mobile phone, some cufflinks) in a glass display cabinet. On top of the cabinet are a pair of computer speakers and a hand holds a small square black box on the end of a grey cable over one of the objects

Back in 2014 we did a project with artist Neil Winterburn to mark the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike.

As part of it, Neil had interviewed miners and their families about a collection of objects that they’d chosen to display for the exhibition.

We built the system you can see here, where an RFID reader on a cable could be placed on tags next to each object and that would trigger playback of the appropriate interview.

A Raspberry Pi computer sits on a table next to a portable speaker, and has some wires coming out of it that run to a square blue box with the Museum in a Box "M" logo cut into its lid. Through the cut-out "M" you can just see a circuit board inside

Not too long after that, George Oates dropped me a line to tell me about a pop-up museum experiment that she was running with Tom Flynn and Harriet Maxwell.

They had a two-week residency in Somerset House; had 3D printed a bunch of objects from museums (mostly the British Museum, I think); and were trying a different way of presenting and configuring the museum each day.

They invited me down to see what sort of interactivity we could build into things.

I took an assortment of bits and pieces, including the parts from 30 Years Of… We flipped the interaction to take the objects to the reader and Museum in a Box was born!

From that original experiment we set up a business and over the years developed the product into the Box you can see here.

It lets any 3D print, postcard, or original object with an NFC sticker applied to it play some custom audio when it’s placed on top of the Box.

Screenshot of the Museum in a Box "Heart" platform, showing a grid of collections. Each collection is illustrated with an image from the set (including the Lion of Knidos from the British Museum; the first Western drawing of a rhino; and a yellow wagtail) with a sparkline of activity below

And we have an online platform to make it easy for people to create their collections, upload the audio, and manage their Box(es)

In 2023 George moved on to lead the Flickr Foundation, working out how to preserve that cultural archive. As a result we wound up Museum in a Box the company and I brought Museum in a Box the project into the MCQN fold.

Anyway, what’s more interesting is how folk have been using their Boxes!

A group of South African schoolchildren crowd round a table holding a Museum in a Box and a bunch of postcards and 3D prints to place onto it

The Amagugu Ethu collective have been using Museum in a Box as part of a decolonisation project in South Africa.

They explored the archives of their local museum; which included many objects from their ancestors and cultural heritage, but with little or no information recorded.

They recorded new descriptions and explanations of the objects to correct and expand upon the records.

A view of an exhibition in a museum. Glass display cases line the walls and there are tables in front of each display case with a chair at each table. On each table is a Museum in a Box with a selection of 3D prints that mirror the objects inside the display case next to it.

Over in Limerick, the Hunt Museum worked with a group of visually-impaired folk in their community to go through their archives and curate an exhibition.

They got the local university to help with 3D scanning and printing some objects, and combined that with audio from the visually-impaired curators.

One of the items in the exhibition was a dress made using elaborate pleated linen. In order to show that in a more accessible manner they created a sampler with the same pleating for visitors to feel.

A yellow Museum in a Box sits on a white table. Next to it are some objects: a felt apple; a small red and yellow plastic watering can; a CD case; and a packet of seeds. Alongside all of that are a couple of display stands - one reads "Unearthed" and the other is a cardboard cut-out garden gnome with some instructions printed next to it

The British Library have seventy-odd Boxes that they’ve distributed to their partner libraries across the country.

That lets them host interactive miniature versions of the exhibitions held in the main British Library in London.

The first of those was for “Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music” last year.

When they then rolled out “Unearthed” this year, they could add the new collection to all of the Boxes and only needed to ship out a new set of objects, as the existing Boxes could be updated over the Internet with the new content.

A blue Museum in a Box surrounded with postcards, a small purse spilling out some coins and a coin display case

The Royal Mint Museum also has a large fleet of Boxes that they use across the UK and Northern Ireland.

But rather than the collections travelling to static Boxes, they ship the Boxes out themselves.

A map of the UK and surrounding area covered in green marker dots, mostly showing anywhere there's a reaonable population of people living

Any care home can request to borrow a Box and objects to run reminiscence sessions with their residents. The Mint Museum ship one out to them and then arrange collection when it’s ready to return.

This map shows where all the Boxes have been, or at least how it looked when they hit 1000 shipments. They’re past 1500 now!

A transparent Museum in a Box is on a table next to an array of 3D prints. There's an actual 5 pence coin, next to a larger 3D printed replica - scaled up to 5 times size - and an even larger one at 10 times real size. There are more 3D prints of a wood ant head; fly head; daisy and dandelion pollens; and grains of sugar and sand - all scaled up to a size where you can handle them to feel what they're like. Finally, there are some 3D printed "cards": rectangles about the size of a playing card with raised lettering describing the various 3D prints (daisy pollen, sand, etc.) in both visual and braille English. The cards have a small copy of the 3D print of the item that they're labels for as a bas relief in the top right corner.

Finally, another project working with visually-impaired folk.

Dr Alex Ball, at the Natural History Museum, has been using Museum in a Box to help a local school for the blind to understand electron microscopy.

He’s got a collection of 3D printed models of things he’s scanned with an electron microscope: from grains of sand and sugar, through assorted pollen and ant and blowfly heads.

In addition to the models he’s been printing label cards which have part of the model embedded in them, alongside embossed text and Braille descriptions.

Looking down on a table across which the (almost) full history of Museum in a Box development has been laid out. Assorted printed circuit boards and all sorts of box designs, from cardboard prototypes to the current design
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company news

George is leaving, Adrian is taking over

After eight happy years, George has decided to leave Museum in a Box. In November 2022, she became the Co-Founder and first Executive Director of the new Flickr Foundation, and that seems like a natural transition moment. 

Adrian McEwen, Tech Lead and original team member, has graciously decided to take over running the business.

Photo of George and Adrian, smiling for the camera

George: Adrian, you’ve agreed to take on the responsibility of running Museum in a Box in its next phase. Why?

Adrian: Having been part of Museum in a Box since the start, I’ve seen it grow and the wealth of lovely projects that the museums and schools and more have done with it. I’ve been happy to take a more behind-the-scenes role, as that allowed me to continue running my existing business, MCQN Ltd, alongside it.

MCQN works on gentle, Internet-connected objects and we’ve been growing the product side of the company more in the last couple of years.  When you decided to move onto new (old) challenges, it seemed a good fit to bring Museum in a Box into the MCQN fold and increase our involvement.

George: What do you most want to do this year?

Adrian: Get new boxes made and back in the shop!

The global chip shortage hasn’t been a fun period to navigate.  There are a couple of key parts of boxes which, if we redesign, will give us more control over production.  It also lets us improve the software update process and, down the line, opens up options such as a USB connection for adding collections.

It’s some work we’d both been discussing for a while, and now is the time to crack on with it.  That requires rewriting the software for the box, and changing some of the electronics inside it; it’ll take a little while to work through that, but should be ready towards the end of the year.

Adrian: What do you feel you didn’t get enough time to work on?

George:  Honestly, I’m happy to step away at this point. I’m very proud that we managed to make Museum in a Box into a batch operation. It was very satisfying for me to develop our box-making so we could work in batches of 100 at a time. I enjoyed making boxes at my dining room table during our long lockdown and sending them all over the place very much indeed. It was extremely satisfying to improvise around all that until I was able to settle on a repeatable process.

I am sad I didn’t get the opportunity to visit with the team at the Royal Mint Museum. I was interested to see what logistics they had created to allow them to send any one of their 75 boxes to any care home in the UK. 

There are obviously extensions and improvements that could have been made to the “Heart” website where people can explore and create collections, but, that’s up to you now!

Adrian: What could be more exciting than working on Museum in a Box?  Your next challenge must be something interesting!

George: Museum in a Box is exciting. I really enjoyed bringing the business into the world, and I especially enjoyed watching people (and particularly kids) using it for the first time. I’ll never forget that look of delight.

But, you’re right. The next thing is a huge challenge. The Flickr photo sharing website is nearly 20 years old, and in that time, it has grown into a picture collection 50 billion pictures strong. It’s one of the biggest picture collections humans have ever assembled, and I believe that means we need to treat it with more care than a corporation is set up to do. So, the Flickr Foundation’s mission is to make Flickr pictures visible in 100 years. Deliberately a long reach, and a big idea, and just the sort of thing a) I like to bite into, and b) I think we need to start developing as a more broad approach and mentality around our digital cultural heritage. We pour our histories into online platforms at a mad rate these days, and there’s a big risk hiding in plain sight there – that we’ll lose it, as corporate and shareholder interests ebb and flow.

Adrian: Which boxes or collections were the most fun/strangest/exciting?

George: While I would never name a favourite child, I do remember some collections fondly, like:

Frogs in a Box – Made for the Smithsonian Institution, this collection combined beautiful illustrations of various frog and toad species with their “songs” taken from a herpetologist’s album of recordings of each species. Simple and wonderful, and wow! Some frog songs can travel for miles.

See Red Women’s Workshop – Developed with the V&A, this collection was installed in a small temporary V&A in London, and one of the first successful “in-gallery” uses. The content was also so simple. Postcards made by the See Red collective, and the stories surrounding that poster or their work at the time, directly from the women who worked on it.

A photo of a corner of a gallery at the V & A, showing posters alongside a Museum in a Box with an array of postcards-with-tags above it.
V&A

Nos statues préférées – our favorite statues – one of our testers for the Make Your Own product was a school in the French Alps. The students made 3D prints of famous sculptures around the world, and wrote their own scripts to describe them. The personified La statue du Christ Rédempteur is a source of great joy.

Generally, a smile always crossed my lips whenever I came across a collection in a different language. That is one of my favourite features – that a Box can speak any language!

Adrian: What would you put into your ideal collection?

George: I had always dreamt of a collection that grows and updates over time. One idea was to have the bust of my favourite newsreader and a Box in my kitchen. Each morning, I could place her on the Box to hear the latest news stories as I enjoyed my morning coffee. Or, I could give a Box to my parents (who live 10,000 miles away) and could send them postcards with a sticker and a story from me from my adventures. My Dad has dementia now too, so he’d probably enjoy a collection that plays him Queen songs.

Adrian: Ooh, that would be lovely. *makes notes for future developments* It has been fantastic to work with you over these past eight years; the Flickr Foundation is in great hands and I look forward to watching it develop!

FAQ

Will I be able to order a Box soon?  As mentioned in the discussion, we’ve got some development work to do before we can produce the next batch.  We should have that done and orders opened up in late 2023.

Will the existing boxes still be supported?  Yes.  Nothing changes around that, email info@museuminabox.org or post to the #get-help channel in the Museum in a Box Slack, as usual, for any support issues.