The Box

A Museum in a Box is small acrylic or plywood box. It comes with a collection  of objects – 3D prints, postcards, documents, maps and the like;  anything you can pick up and touch – and can be sent anywhere in the world!

It’s designed to be simple and accessible, and we hope one day to incorporate its construction into our Make Your Own products. For now though, we’ve decided it’s more important that we’re certain the Boxes all work as they leave HQ.

• How does it work?
• Check out the Museum in a Box Github repo – we try to be open source where we can.

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Tech is a tool, not our master

This is one of our company values. The technology is not the most interesting part of our company. That’s why we like sharing exactly how it works. We even have a variant that’s got a transparent exterior, so you can see exactly how it works. We’ve written more about our tech transparency on the blog.

In 2019, we had a bunch of fun figuring out how to remove all the wires and other laborious handiwork from our production process and put it into our own Printed Circuit Board (or PCB), which we have also annotated, so you can read the technology and learn what’s happening.

Small batch operation

We make our product by hand at our office in Hoxton, London. We normally prepare enough inventory to make 100 units at a time. This is a pace and scale that suits us very well, given our small but mighty stature.

We’ve made great strides in “handcrafted manufacturing” to cut our assembly time down to about 5 minutes per Box. For reference, we made three boxes in two days the first time we tried it. For any manufacturing geeks out there, that’s a 2,000% increase in productivity.

Twenty Boxes in twenty seconds! from Museum in a Box on Vimeo.

Photo history of the box design

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Our major suppliers are Pimoroni, European Circuits, Sound Buzzer Technology, Bitsbox, and Farnell.