Categories
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
Categories
notes public domain

Sharing made easy

The image shows a collection of 3D printed items available on Heart. It displays items such as a Blowfly head and a Jetblade

Chris has been busy putting together a collection of 3D items that he is using in workshops with schools. The collection demonstrates a range of uses for additive manufacturing. He has curated a collection of items that are all CC-BY, which refers to the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows others to share, adapt, and reuse their work, even commercially, as long as they attribute the original creator. You can find out more about Creative Commons licenses here.

Not all the items on the Heart platform are CC-BY but many are, we welcome people to share their 3D scans, images and audio by attributing it to CC-BY, so everyone can add them to their collections.

Enlightening others audiences with your new collection
It is be possible for one Museum to share its collection with any other Heart User, be they a school down the road or a Museum across the world.

Having the ability to share your own items worldwide, not only empowers the sharing organisations by extending the reach of their collection, it is also a great advocacy tool by allowing people to “visit” the item before they have even stepped through the contributing organisations door.

Already now, this takes place in a small way with the British Library or Royal Mint Museum’s collections, which they use on more than one box. In the formers case the boxes are distributed around the UK to Libraries, but each with the same standard collection on it. Find out more about The British Library’s Unearthed project.

Chris’s Utilization of STL files

This 3d printed construction shows a very small lunar rover with an extending arm that is constructing a small building. The building is just 4 walls right now.

3D Printed Construction Image is CC-BY. If you would like to download the STL file for this 3D print then you can go here for the details on Heart plus you can utilize the audio which is also CC-BY licensed.

All of Chris’s objects in the collection are available here. https://heart.museuminabox.org/view_collection/3501

If you have purchased a box you should have access to Heart and have the ability to upload 3D prints as an STL file.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer
Image license: CC-BY-NC-SA

This is an example of a 3D print created by user @ecoleStAndre a small rural primary school in the French Alps.

Visit this item on Heart or download the STL file for this print

STL files explained: An STL file is the most widely available format used for 3D printing. STL officially stands for stereolithography. It’s essentially just a file format that describes 3d objects.

How do you create 3D objects?

If you are looking to create a replica of an existing object you will need to make a 3d scan. Professional services are available to create high resolution models of objects through Photogrammetry or digital scanning. If you want to do it yourself good results can be achieved with available Photogrammetry software. We’ll go into more details about this in a future blog.

Alternatively if you are looking to create an new object to illustrate your collection, like Chris’s imagined moon 3d printer, you can with freely available software. Naturally we favour Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) so our recommendations are Blender and FreeCAD.

Both of these allow you to export your finalized 3D image as an STL file.

Depending on your make of 3D printer you may need to use their recommended slicer software to obtain a good final print.

3D printing is building up layers of plastic to form a 3 dimensional model.

3D scanning refers to the process of collecting data about a real world object, this is often a process undertaken by experts. This data is then pieced together often using specialist software to recreate a 3D representation of the object on screen. 3D scanning uses elements of Photogrammetry

The process of scanning and printing replica objects is becoming increasingly more accessible due to ease of access to the software and hardware tools needed.

We hope to feature more pubic collections that are based on Creative Commons licenses very soon.

Categories
case study oral history

Oral History

1940's (approx) BW image of the interior of a gentlemans shop peering down the inside. It features glass cabinets and a range of ties on stands and clothes on hangers falling from the walls. Four well dressed people also appear.

Preserving the Pulse of a Place: The Power of Oral History and the Story Shop Project

Oral history is one of the most powerful ways to preserve the heartbeat of a community. It gives voice to the everyday experiences that often slip through the cracks of written history—stories told in a person’s own words, filled with memory, emotion, humour, hardship, and perspective. More than just a method of recording the past, oral history is a human act of listening, respecting, and safeguarding the living memory of people and places.

Projects like Story Shop, based in Oswestry, Shropshire, show just how meaningful and transformative this kind of work can be.

Why Oral History Matters

At its heart, oral history is about storytelling—real, lived stories that connect generations and ground us in place and time. Unlike traditional historical records, which often privilege institutions, dates, and written documentation, oral histories capture the texture of life: the smell of a market, the feeling of a wartime dance, the sound of children playing in a street long since redeveloped.

These personal accounts enrich our understanding of history. They bring depth to public memory and ensure that everyone—regardless of background, status, or education—has the chance to contribute to the collective record.

Oral history is especially powerful in times of change. As economies shift, communities evolve, and high streets adapt to new pressures, it becomes more important than ever to preserve the memories that show how we’ve lived, adapted, and connected with one another.

The Work Behind the Stories

Capturing oral histories is both rigorous and delicate. It begins with careful planning: identifying the purpose of the project, choosing interviewees, and understanding the historical and cultural context.

Interviews aren’t just quick chats—they’re thoughtful, often emotional conversations built on trust. Trained interviewers listen more than they speak, guiding narrators to recall memories in their own way. The interviews are recorded, transcribed, and archived, often with metadata that makes them discoverable and usable for researchers, educators, and future generations.

Ethical care underpins every step—especially when dealing with sensitive or traumatic memories. Informed consent is key, and participants must feel empowered to share only what they’re comfortable with.

Story Shop: A Living Archive of Oswestry

The Story Shop project is a shining example of what oral history can achieve when rooted in community and carried out with care. Created to capture the changing story of Oswestry’s town, high street, and surrounding rural areas, Story Shop reflects the town’s evolving identity through the voices of its people.

Led by a passionate team of volunteers trained by the Oral History Society, the project focuses on intergenerational storytelling. It’s already collected a rich tapestry of memories from residents aged 40 to 95—capturing reflections on local railways, farming life, hospital work, shopping, and the unique experience of growing up on the Welsh-English border.

Each story adds texture to a broader narrative of change—how Oswestry has adapted to modern pressures like the cost of living crisis, online shopping, and demographic shifts. But these aren’t just stories about loss or nostalgia; they’re full of resilience, pride, and belonging.

All recordings are preserved in the Shropshire Archives, ensuring they’ll be accessible to future generations. A curated audio exhibition, ‘The Story So Far…’, brings these voices to life for the public, showcasing the power of lived memory to engage, educate, and inspire.

And the work continues. The team is now gathering voices from younger residents aged 18 to 40, ensuring the project reflects a fuller picture of life in Oswestry today. These future-focused stories are just as important—they show how heritage is not just something we inherit, but something we actively shape.

A Lasting Impact

Oral history doesn’t just preserve the past—it honours people. It says, “Your story matters.” And in doing so, it strengthens communities, deepens understanding, and brings history to life in the most human way possible.

Projects like Story Shop remind us of what’s possible when we slow down and listen—really listen—to the stories around us. They’re not just capturing history; they’re creating it

You can listen to the Story Shop’s collection on Heart, although much of their collection is private, some items are not, such as this one about Employment.

Featured image is CC0 – Public Domain

Bronx Oral Histories

A late addendum to this post but one which we are really pleased about is this Oral History project from the Bronx County Historical Society.

They produced Uptown Rumble: Heavy Music in The Bronx. Which documents the rich history of hard rock, heavy metal, punk rock, and related genres in The Bronx from the mid-1960s through the present. This collection includes clips from full-length oral histories recorded for the project.

Find out more and listen to the clips here.

Categories
case study

Case Study: Unearthed – The Power of Gardening

The British Library, in collaboration with the Living Knowledge Network—a partnership of public and national libraries across the UK—launched Unearthed: The Power of Gardening in May 2025. This exhibition explores gardening as a transformative force for creativity, resilience, and community connection. Over 30 library services participated, bringing the exhibition to diverse audiences nationwide.

Project Goals

The Unearthed project aimed to:

  • Celebrate the cultural and social significance of gardening.
  • Engage communities through personal and global narratives related to horticulture.
  • Utilize innovative technologies to create interactive and accessible experiences in library settings.

Implementation

To enhance the exhibition’s interactivity, the British Library integrated Museum in a Box devices into the Unearthed displays. These devices allowed visitors to engage with 3D-printed objects and accompanying audio narratives, providing a tactile and auditory exploration of gardening’s impact.

Key features included:

  • 3D-Printed Objects: Replicas of botanical illustrations and gardening tools.
  • Audio Narratives: Stories and poems related to gardening, including works by Inua Ellams and oral histories from figures like Judy Ling Wong and Jyoti Fernandes.

Libraries across the UK, such as Newcastle City Library and Mansfield Central Library, hosted the exhibition, tailoring the experience to their local communities.

Outcomes

The integration of Museum in a Box technology achieved several positive outcomes:

  • Enhanced Engagement: Visitors experienced a multi-sensory journey, deepening their connection to the exhibition’s themes.
  • Community Involvement: Local adaptations of the exhibition encouraged community participation and storytelling.
  • Educational Impact: The interactive elements facilitated learning across age groups, making complex histories accessible and engaging.

Lessons Learned

The Unearthed project demonstrated the effectiveness of combining traditional exhibition content with interactive technology:

  • Scalability: The portable nature of Museum in a Box allowed for easy distribution and setup across various library settings.
  • Accessibility: The tactile and auditory components made the exhibition more inclusive, catering to diverse learning styles and abilities.
  • Community Relevance: Allowing local libraries to adapt the exhibition content fostered a sense of ownership and relevance within communities.

Conclusion

Unearthed: The Power of Gardening exemplifies how cultural institutions can leverage technology to enrich public engagement. By integrating Museum in a Box into the exhibition, the British Library and the Living Knowledge Network created a dynamic and accessible experience that resonated with audiences nationwide.

For more information on the Unearthed exhibition and its components, visit the Living Knowledge Network’s official page and explore the Museum in a Box collection.

Every project tells a story. When one chapter closes, Museum in a Box helps you transform it into the foundation of the next — keeping ideas alive, evolving, and ready to inspire new audiences.

Categories
sludge

2024 and counting

Museum in a Box Connect to Wifi card and Check for Updates card

It’s just past Christmas and right now it is all about numbers, as we countdown to the new year.

On the theme of counting we have been doing some analysis of the Boops that appear on the Heart Network – a Boop occurs when an object is placed on your Museum in a Box and if your Box is connected, even occasionally to the network then these totalised Boops are uploaded and added to your total for that object.

We ran some reports on the number of recorded Boops across all the collections private and public, throughout 2024 and the results are in. There have been a massive 20,218 Boops this year. With our top Five collections belonging to The Hunt Museum, The Royal Mint Museum, Museum in a Box HQ (these are the cards and objects we send out with the boxes), next up is the fabulous project from the British Library – Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music and finally the Big objects in the British Museum’s collection.

But storming away in the charts for 2024 were The Hunt Museum who have the top three objects in the top 5 Boops. With a wooden Mether, the god Thoth as a baboon and Ceramic hand as their top 3 items. At Number 4 in our object chart is the Apollo 11 launch try me card, from our own collection as it goes out with every box. And at No. 5 is a herpetologist’s delight, the Gray Tree Frog from the Smithsonian Museum.

If you have a Box, then you can update the statistics (the number of Boops) you have gathered on your collection by using the update card. You will need to connect your Box to the internet to do this. Both the Update and Connect to Wifi cards will have been sent to you with your Box. You can see the cards at the top of this post.

Then the next time someone asks you what kind of interactions your box has been receiving then you can simple get them to visit your collection on Heart.

Hope you have a great New Year. Boop!

Categories
case study

Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music

Graphic image from the Beyond the Bassline 500 years of Black British Music

British Library, Living Knowledge Network

The British Library is one of the world’s largest libraries, holding a vast collection of books, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts. The Living Knowledge Network aims to democratize access to this vast heritage, allowing local communities to experience national treasures and cultural stories through libraries across the UK.

The goal of using Museum in a Box within the Living Knowledge Network was to make cultural and historical artifacts more accessible to local communities, particularly through hands-on learning. The British Library wanted to provide a tangible, interactive experience to engage people of all ages with their collections.

As part of the Living Knowledge Network, Museum in a Box was circulated to various libraries around the UK. Each library received a set of 3D-printed objects with accompanying audio descriptions, allowing visitors to engage with artifacts in new and exciting ways. The audio included context about the artifacts, with storytelling elements that brought history to life.

For example, Suffolk Libraries used Museum in a Box as part of their “Beyond the Bassline” exhibition, celebrating Black British music and culture. This initiative, running in 2022, allowed visitors to explore the evolution of Black British music through 3D objects and audio, fostering a deeper understanding of this cultural movement.

To supplement “Beyond the Bassline”, Coventry Libraries had recordings of poetry and spoken word supplied by Coventry Poet Laureate John Bernard. These sound and audio samples were taken from their collections and available to loan. You can visit the Coventry Libraries collection on our Heart Platform.

The use of Museum in a Box successfully engaged visitors with artifacts and cultural heritage in an immersive, multi-sensory way. Libraries like Suffolk highlighted Black British music through interactive exhibits that combined storytelling with physical objects. Feedback from both librarians and participants was positive, with visitors praising the hands-on and auditory elements that made the exhibits more accessible and engaging.

The British Library’s use of Museum in a Box demonstrated the power of combining tactile engagement with digital storytelling to enrich cultural education. Libraries found that the technology was effective in reaching audiences who might not traditionally engage with museum exhibits or library collections. It also fostered community involvement and inspired other libraries to think creatively about how to present cultural content.

The British Library’s Living Knowledge Network successfully used Museum in a Box to democratize access to cultural artifacts. The initiative exemplifies how libraries can serve as cultural hubs, making national collections accessible at a local level while also encouraging community engagement with underrepresented cultural stories.

For further details about the British Library’s Living Knowledge Network and how Suffolk Libraries implemented Museum in a Box as part of their “Beyond the Bassline” exhibition, visit their respective pages​.

Living Knowledge Network

Suffolk Libraries

A late addendum to this post from June 2025 where we just heard that Beyond the Bassline won the Museums & Heritage award 2025 for this show. More detail here
Categories
case study

Hunt Museum, Limerick

Members of the European Heritage summit sit at a table examining 3D printed sculptures.
Members of the European Heritage summit sit at a table examining 3D printed sculptures.

This case study explores how the Museum in a Box device was used as part of their Seeing Without Sight project to deliver a multi-sensory museum experience.

The Hunt Museum, located in Limerick, Ireland, has a rich collection of art and historical artifacts. Their mission is to increase accessibility, making museum experiences inclusive to all visitors, particularly those with disabilities.

The Seeing Without Sight project aimed to break barriers for visually impaired individuals, enabling them to engage with museum artifacts through sensory exploration. A key component was the use of Museum in a Box, which allowed visitors to interact with 3D-printed replicas of museum objects, paired with audio descriptions.

The project was co-created with visually impaired individuals, who participated in workshops to select objects, create vivid descriptions, and even record their voices for the audio guides. The Museum in a Box technology played a crucial role in enhancing this experience by delivering tactile and auditory engagement with the artifacts.

The project has been celebrated for its innovative approach, winning the Inclusive Event Award at the 2023 Heritage Council Awards. Visitors were able to touch 3D-printed replicas of objects while listening to audio descriptions via the Museum in a Box, making the museum experience more interactive and accessible to those with visual impairments. This method is being looked at as a model for other museums globally.

Hunt Museum, Limerick

“The Seeing Without Sight project and exhibition formed an important milestone on the Hunt Museum’s journey to expand access and inclusion for people with disabilities. The accessibility design solutions presented in it benefited and enriched the experience for everyone, not just people with visual impairment.  The exhibition was a huge success and particularly enabled us to build strong relationships with disability groups from across the Midwest in Ireland. Arts and Disability Ireland and Vision Ireland were huge supporters and promoted it to their service users on an on-going basis.” Maria Cagney, Curator of Education and Outreach

Their Seeing Without Sight Project involved:

  1. A year of workshops during which our visually impaired co-creators explored Collection objects through touch and supported the writing of audio description text for 35 objects
  2. Visually impaired co-creators performed the audio recordings of nine objects of the objects they selected. they selected. These were presented using Museum in a Box.
  3. Rapid Innovation Unit at the University of Limerick 3D printed 8/9 objects to exceptionally high quality and standard
  4. Large yellow interpretative panel was designed to work in conjunction with screen reader technology
  5. Object labels were made available in large format and braille
  6. Sensory station desks are height adaptable for wheel chairs

Lessons Learned

The use of Museum in a Box demonstrated that technology could enhance museum accessibility and inclusivity. By combining tactile learning with audio, the Hunt Museum ensured that all visitors could form a connection with the objects in their collection, expanding the scope of traditional museum interaction.

For further details about the project, you can refer to the Hunt Museum’s documentation of the Seeing Without Sight project​.

The featured image is of the European Heritage Hub at the Royal Palace, National Gallery, Bucharest, as part of the second European Heritage Summit, which was organised by Europeana Foundation in partnership with Europa Nostra. Photo Courtesy of the Hunt Museum Limerick

The Hunt Museum

Heritage Week 2023

Categories
company news

Changes over the, ahem, *checks notes* last 15 months.

Inside a Blue Museum in a Box
Inside a Blue Museum in a Box

The big news that we want to bring you is that Museum in a Box batch 5 is now shipping and available to purchase from the store. That’s the most important thing we need to tell you.

As we mentioned in our last update, to get back to making boxes we needed to redesign some of the electronics, including the computer at the heart of it. That meant we had to rewrite the software, and that’s done too. It’s faster to boot up and now uses USB-C.

We also took this opportunity to replace the NFC reader. The old ones were getting difficult to source and were one of the weaker components in the design. The new one is designed in-house and we’ve released it as open source hardware for other folk to use too!

All of this means that we have solved the supply issues which had plagued us post pandemic.

We have been busy and although we might not have been busy writing blog posts we have been busy sending post, as most of Batch 4 went out to the British Library for their project Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music. The British Library in turn circulated these to partner libraries up and down the country with accompanying objects for Beyond the Bassline.

Partner libraries across the country each received a pair of boxes to take Beyond the Bassline to a national audience. Some of the libraries came up with their own local projects to complement it, for example Coventry Libraries came up with Tales of Two Tone which has proved really popular, looking at the number of boops they have had. You can see Coventry’s collection on the Heart platform here.

We’d also like to highlight the wonderful display that Suffolk Libraries have made of theirs. The easy chairs look great to settle down in for a afternoon of easy listening.

If you would like to experience Beyond the Bassline in your area them some projects are still open to engage with, you can find where and what dates they are available on the British Library’s Living Knowledge Network.

This summer, we had some great feedback while displaying Museum in a Box at Liverpool Makefest: teachers who were busy booping our Try Me Objects were telling us just how useful they would be in the classroom; and kids enjoying hearing the different frogs from Frogs in a Box.

Frogs in a box cards displayed alongside Museum in a box

For now folks that is all but we promise that we will be bringing you more soon. Did we mention that Museum in a Box batch 5 is now available?

Categories
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.

Categories
company news

Houston, we had a (really big) problem.

Version 2 of this post, published Mon 18 October, 2021:
Crisis averted! We’ve fixed the really big problem by creating a DNS-level with an alternate encryption certificate already living on the Raspberry Pi inside our Boxes. So, it’s the kind of fix people who haven’t read any of this will even have noticed.

And here’s a gentle reminder to do an update of your Boxes from time to time so you can keep up to date with improvements we’re making to the software. Version 1.2 is coming up, which will have improvements to the way the Box reports boops to include the ones that happen when your Box isn’t on WiFi. Once you do updates after your Box is on V1.2, any offline boops will get sent back to HQ for inclusion in the boop log.

Version 1 of this post, published Wed 13 October, 2021:
Something has changed in a third-party service that’s affected all our Boxes which use a protocol called HTTPS to securely connect to Heart, our web platform. We’re sorry to report that a ‘root certificate’ that ensures this secure HTTPS connection has expired. This means Boxes out in the world cannot currently connect to Heart and therefore cannot get updates to collections or write stickers. Any content already loaded on Boxes will work without issue. 

This is obviously very bad and we’re working on what we can do about it. (This is in addition to waiting for the global chip shortage to sort itself out so we can get on with Batch No. 3.)

Kanagawa oki nami ura

Glossary

How does a Box use HTTPS?

Most websites these days use HTTPS to make sure all the traffic between your computer and the website is encrypted and secure. Your Museum in a Box is no different, so whenever it has to talk to our Heart platform it uses the same approach.

This encryption is done by both sides—the Box and Heart—agreeing on a set of secret keys each time the Box needs to connect to Heart. They use the agreed-upon keys to encrypt messages back and forth, so anyone who manages to intercept the messages won’t understand them.

There’s a second level of protection called certificates. Certificates are needed because there’s a chance that even as the Box is carefully encrypting messages for Heart using HTTPS they could still be decoded by someone impersonating Heart. To prevent this impersonator service reading messages, HTTPS adds certificates, which are digitally signed by a trusted third-party to verify a website is who it says it is. The Box uses the certificate to see that it really is talking to Heart before it shares any keys.

Who is the “trusted third-party?” Our certificates are signed by Let’s Encrypt. In turn, their certificates are signed by Digital Signature Trust. The certificate that Digital Signature Trust used to sign those is called a “root certificate”, because it’s at the end of the chain. The root certificates are ones that your web browser or operating system chose to trust and were installed at the same time as the software.

How do encryption certificates work?

Certificates have two parts: 

  1. a public part, which is what we’ve been talking about so far and can be shared with anyone and everyone; and 
  2. a private part, which is used in the signing process and must be kept safe on the website and not shared with anyone.

Given there’s a chance that the private part of a certificate might get leaked or stolen certificates also have an expiry date. That means that any compromised certificates will only cause problems until they run out.

Normal website certificates tend to have quite short lifespans. The Let’s Encrypt certificates that we use for Heart, for example, only last three months. 

Root certificates tend to have much longer life spans because updating them is harder—the replacement certificates need to be shared to all the computers that might connect to the website, or, in our case, all the Boxes. These root certificates do expire, and the root certificate that signs all the Let’s Encrypt certificates we use expired at the end of September 2021. 

How does this affect anyone with a Box?

Until we get a fix in place, all the Boxes out in the world will refuse to talk to Heart.  That means it isn’t possible to write new stickers, or add or update any of the content on the Box. Any content already on a Box or stickers already written will continue to work just fine.

This is obviously very bad. 

We’re working on a fix for the problem and will post updates here and probably on Twitter. In the meantime, if you have any questions, do please get in touch. Here’s an invitation link to join our Slack and there’s a channel in there called #get-help we’ll be updating in, or you’re welcome to email us at info@museuminabox.org if you prefer.