The Jewish Museum London (JML) commissioned a Box from us last year, about remembering Jewish people who served in WWI and WWII.
They got in touch with us again this year to see about doing an upgrade of their Box – our first upgrade!
Since we delivered the initial commission, the Box’s core design has seen some important changes, and in fact, we declared V1.0 of the physical design back in February this year. We’ve also been gradually improving the software that runs the core Box interactions, so this was a good chance to upgrade the code on the JML Box while we were poking around.
Physical upgrades
- The plywood ‘skull’ has been simplified with the speaker and power jacks now exposed on the back of the box, along with access to one of the Pi’s USB ports. (We’re not sure what we want to do with that yet. One idea is to incorporate a microphone into the mix.)
- Most of the previous perforations across the older ‘skull’ have now been filled in, to focus the sound (so it doesn’t just bounce around inside the box), and most importantly,
- We’ve replaced the old tiny stereo speakers with one beefy new mono one (see below)!
So, to do the upgrade, we took back the museum’s old Box, gutted it, reusing what we could before cutting them a new V1.0 Box in plywood, reconstructing it with the new sound components, and handing it back.
There were two other important aspects of the upgrade: the audio clips and the software. The museum had tested their Box in schools and found the audio was too long. We’ve been evaluating this challenge across all the Collections we’ve made, and developing a much better understanding about audio duration and content types that work really well with young children. Our main conclusion is – perhaps unsurprisingly – if clips are too long people begin to disengage and switch off. Therefore, the museum trimmed some of their lengthier tracks down and we republished them to the Box.
Now, with WiFi!
It’s now possible to configure each Box in situ to get on to a WiFi network, so we made the cheeky addition inside the shiny new packaging – a WiFi card! The card allows the box to connect to a local WiFi network with the assistance of a smartphone, tablet or computer.
The upgrade gave us the opportunity to test the new wifi configuration out in the wild for the first time as well as update the shortened audio tracks onsite using the museum’s WiFi. Once the box was online, and after a little troubleshooting had been done, the box automatically pulled down and updated the new audio tracks!
What WiFi means for the future
Upgrading the Jewish Museum London’s box has been a great testbed for us to learn how we can retro-fit and improve upon older boxes as well as provide on-site updates to content without the need for physical intervention from us- this is an exciting development that’s heading towards our long term goal, where we can offer subscriptions to people who have Boxes. Say you like Natural History” and you subscribe, every month (or so), you get a new set of things delivered from museums all over the world, and your Box just knows about the new set of things because we’ve been able to update it in the background.
Huge thanks to the JML crew for inquiring about the upgrade and for being patient while we figured out a method of best practice!
Charlie