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…
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…
That might be some sensors in a chicken food silo on a farm…
Or air quality sensors to remotely monitor pollution…
Or an experimental radio for the BBC.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
