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.
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?
It’s a sign of a crazy last few months that I haven’t been able to write properly about our biggest project yet. At the end of April, Charlie, Adrian and I went to Washington, DC, to hand-deliver 11 Boxes to Smithsonian Libraries.
It’s the first time we’ve been commissioned to deliver more than one Box.
It’s the first time we’ve been able to bring in folks from the creative industries to join the crew specifically, two writers, three actors, and a big fancy-lookin’ recording studio. This allows us to demonstrate our content creation capacity (so if a museum wants to commission this service from us, we can show them great work).
The deployment is being formally evaluated (and that’s already really interesting).
This is the first of a couple of posts I’d like to write about this commission, one other perhaps about how we’ve also been able to level up in our Making Boxes skillz.
Background
Back in 2016, Martin Kalfatovic was in London to celebrate the 10th birthday of the magnificent Biodiversity Heritage Library project, and I asked if he’d like to pop by our office to say hi and see what we were up to with this weird little box thing. He came, he liked it, he paused for a second, and then said “What if…” It wasn’t long after that when he introduced us to Sara Cardello, the Education Specialist at Smithsonian Libraries, whose job it is to get Libraries’ content into the hands of kids.
It wasn’t long after that when Sara and Martin asked us to make a Box for them to show to their Board, to get the idea across and pique their interest. We made what remains one of my favourite Collections to date, Frogs in a Box. It’s a favourite because of the name, frankly, but also because it does a very simple thing well: it blends the collections of two different parts of the Smithsonian into one place. There are photographs of North American frogs from a book published in the early 20th Century combined with Sounds of North American Frogs, an incredibly detailed and rigorous audio commentary in Smithsonian Folkways by a American herpetologist called Charles who, as I understand it, basically spent the 1950s travelling across American recording frog songs.
We decided to go for it, and trial the idea on a smallish scale. Small scale for Smithsonian, large scale for us! Sara – who has proved to be Herculean and brilliant – spent the next 18 months looking for a way to fund developing more boxes to support the development and distribution of the SI Libraries UNSTACKED programme. And then, success! She secured support from two different funding bodies: the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, and the Youth Access Grant supported by the Gates Foundation. And then, wow! We were ready to go. Incredible.
Here are the project specs:
11 Boxes
2 Collections for each Box
7 schools and 2 “discovery spaces” across the USA
40 postcards and 4x 3D prints in each Collection
Collections
We planned to create two new Collections for the project, and each one shared the same structure of four main themes + 40 postcards + four 3D prints, but the content was very different.
Stories of Migration from the Asia-Pacific to America
Following the stories of four characters in the form of letters to and from their families. Ben from China, Hong from Vietnam, Abraham from Bikini Atoll, and Rhea from New York (with family from Trinidad & Tobago and India). Sprinkled with facts about rules and regulations for migrants new to the USA, and hints of cultural expression from home countries, this set is an emotive and personal look at what it would have been like to make the big journey in search of something better.
Here’s one of the stories from Ben:
Crew
Curation & Writing: Louise To Actor: Suni La Sound Recording: Offset Audio Sound Post-Production: Charlie Cattel-Killick Director: George Oates
History of STEM from the Dibner Collection
Four sets of cards aligned with the STEM categories: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths, this set tells various stories of the history of STEM through imagery in some important scientific texts from The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology mixed with first-person accounts and other dramatisations of scientific subjects.
What might it be like to actually be a Black Hole?
I’ll plan to write a bit more about the design, production, delivery and evaluation of this commission – it was a big step for us in terms of our production capacity. In the meantime, here’s a quote from one of the kids we met in DC:
This is just a short post to let you know that we’re absolutely thrilled to be a part of the Spring 2018 cohort of the Young Foundation’s accelerator programme, the Young Academy! It’s a short post because we’re learning all kinds of useful things about working on our business plan, moulding our mission towards educational equity, and getting ready for the pitch day at the end of the program.
After a very busy and productive first six months of this year building and delivering our recent commissions with The British Museum, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, it’s a great time to step back and zoom out a little to refactor and realign our goals. The Young Foundation could not be a better fit, in terms of their mission to tackle major social challenges through research and social innovation.
It’s also be great to meet and hear from the other founders in the cohort. There’s nothing like realising that you’re not alone in your own set of challenges, and that lots of entrepreneurs out there are facing lots of the same things (and succeeding in spite of them!). It’s exciting to start to believe that what we’re doing has real potential and that we might even be able to attract investment.
I’ll likely post a few more updates as our realignment and thinking coalesce into a stronger story…
A little while back, Alex Bate from the Raspberry Pi Foundation discovered us through The Planets box Tom made over a weekend to experiment with a new object form factor, and public domain content, Holst’s The Planets.
It was lovely to get a note from Alex wanting to find out more, and even better to host her at our office to meet and talk about everything, and write an article for MagPi, the magazine published by the Foundation.
But, what was absolutely the best and a thrill for this little crew, was to walk across the street to the local newsagent and buy as many copies of MagPi #54, and turn to the amazing four-page spread Alex wrote about us!!
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