afternoon, thoughts

The Small Museum V2

Last weekend, I joined in the fun at the BBC HomeLab Kitchen held at the MozFest 2015 event at Ravensbourne in Greenwich. I was invited by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, who was programming the kitchen. She asked if I would construct a “last minute museum” to reflect what had happened in the preceding two days, where last minute was just that, revealing the museum display (and its ideas) to a group at around 5pm on the Sunday to whoever was there, and with prosecco. (Prosecco is excellent presentation bait, by the way.)

All in all, I found the experience of attending and participating in an event to record and report on it good fun and a bit odd. I participated in a couple of the workshops on the Saturday, and listened to what I think was the best session on Sunday – a panel with an architect, a professor and a designer discussing kitchen design and its place in constructing female reality.

Here’s what the space looked like:

Themes for the Last Minute Good Home Kitchen Museum

1. Technology vs Reality

It was especially clear from a couple of the workshops that what’s technically possible with an arduino, a pliable api and a willing participant is often a long way from the reality of the kitchen as a space.

The kitchens I know and love are often a bit of a mess, full of steam and delicious smells, covered in dishes at their cooking heights, and perhaps most importantly, where people congregate, especially at parties. Yet the kitchens we see in work like Corning’s A Day Made of Glass shows a pristine environment that evokes a similar sense as a building that’s designed to never be lived in. The glass/chrome/clean/clinical tech thing just doesn’t gel with a real kitchen. For me, at least.

It was here that I invoked the power of Julia Child, as my talisman of woman expert, a powerful cook, and fully in charge of her domain. I drew upon her kitchen design, now part of the Smithsonian’s collection, as a direct and deliberate design made literally just to fit her. The distance from there to a day made of glass is great.

Anab Jain, a designer and panellist on day two, suggested to the group that we need to look across cultures and families to understand the flow and rhythms of a kitchen and design for it accordingly. She spoke of the dearth of communal food preparation, and its replacement by fast food and isolation.

It also struck me that this XYZ vs. Reality theme is echoed in the work we did at The Small Museum V1, on our day working with Nandi, the lonely steed of Shiva. We made an installation to try to reveal how Nandi lives in the real world (surrounded by people, food, smoke, prayers, colour, flowers, food), and contrast that with his position in the British Museum, in a stark cold blue room off The Great Court.

2. Woman as audience of kitchen

Active male, passive female

I knew as soon as Alex approached me that I wanted to incorporate kitchen infomercials somehow. You know the ones, where women are struggling at the start of the commercial with some simple or mundane task like putting utensils away, only to be saved by characters like Chef Tony and his amazing widget. Every infomerical I watched has a woman “host” quite passively listening to a male chef or other saviour who’s here to rescue here from her inability to operate her kitchen.

Julia Child’s strength and excellence was also a useful contrast to this dynamic, and I found this excellent picture of her holding a huge fish and smiling.

Julia Child and Fish

There’s a lot more to this than just that. This idea that women are often the audience to technological wizardry bears further thought.

And now, The Small Museum V2 lives in a single manila folder, this blog post, and two separate Flickr accounts (mine and Peter’s). There may also be other photographs of it (because I saw people take some), but I have no idea where they might be. I incorporated some quotes I gathered as I witnessed the event, and I had collected lots of workshop detritus, including the “Buddhist Carpenter’s Co-operative” emblem. I also kept back a plate and fork (and a bit of cake) from Saturday’s afternoon tea. I’d stashed it away, and popped a sign up that asked it not be removed, but on Sunday, it was gone! (Either that’s my first museum theft, or someone just did a good job of cleaning up overnight.)

Here’s what the display ended up being, a lot of paper and printouts and sticky tape and post-its and sharpie labels, laid out on a table in the space:

The final museum display

Along with Alexandra, the event was hosted by Peter Bihr and we were also joined by Marcel and Harm from The Incredible Machine, who co-wrote the new IoT Design Manifesto. The museum more or less culminated in a point of view, which was to suggest one addition to the manifesto, given the thinking and absorbing of the ethically centered conversations from the previous two days: to keep liberating women as we continue to develop IoT and other technologies.

Upon reflection, making this last minute museum was a lot like the early stages of designing something. It was a bunch of listening and collecting, and then re-presenting what I’d heard synthesised into some strong concepts. Roll on, V3!

thoughts

What is it a museum of?

As I chat with people about the general idea, the first question I get in response is usually what is it a museum of? Given that, it’s useful for me to write down the answer, roughly anyway.

In some ways, the collection is irrelevant. What I’m interested in exploring is the mechanics of a small cultural institution, the thing itself. Yes, that means exhibitions and caring for a collection (or else is it even a museum?), but it seems to me that a lot of the tools specific to the sector are about collections management, digital asset management, and customer relationship management. By us not focussing directly on the collection, it might allow us to ask new questions and develop new tools for the more prosaic operations that small institutions perform. The research challenge here is to try to help keep small institutions alive, and an expensive piece of software that only looks after their collection isn’t the way to do that.

One friend referred me to the IMLS definition list: “Museums include, but are not limited to, aquariums, arboretums, art museums, botanical gardens, children’s/youth museums, general museums (those having two or more significant disciplines), historic houses/sites, history museums, natural history/anthropology museums, nature centers, planetariums, science/technology centers, specialized museums (limited to a single distinct subject), and zoological parks.”

To try avoid getting stuck in the collection diversity question, or perhaps at least delay attention to it, my current plan is to perhaps only have a single object in the museum, perhaps even for as long as a year. So, a collection, to be sure, but a very small one. This is for various reasons:

To think long and deep about how practice can start changing to gather and collate and keep multiple descriptions and perspectives on objects, with rigour. I bet we won’t be able to resist collecting other bits and pieces along the way to help describe the First Object, but would try to keep that to a minimum.
To constrain research and exploration to the set of infrastructural things small institutions need to be able to run. I’m thinking mundane things, and I want to understand all (other) aspects of small institutions, not just their collections. My hope is that the R&D we do to create the small institution and have it run well and smoothly will not be about collection stuff, but about infrastructural support with things like volunteer management and transaction management. In time, the tools we might design and build to help run our small museum might be able to be generalized for these other types of institutions. It’s almost as if the collection is irrelevant. There’s a ton of interesting work to do exploring that One Object concept.
The one object is going to be something mundane. A modern day amphora, if you will. Something full of stories that lots of people are familiar with and possible even have.

As I’ve chatted to friends about the idea, more than one of them have responded with “It’s a museum of museums,” and I really like that. Another description is “a museum of metadata,” which is also growing on me.

I’ve also been really inspired by the UNESCO Handbook for Running a Museum. It was published in 2004, I think, and basically intended to be distributed around the Middle East as the war raged around it. You can see from the list of subjects that there’s a bunch of other stuff that museums need to do apart from looking after their collections:

The Role of Museums and the Professional Code of Ethics
Collections Management
Inventories and Documentation
Care and Preservation of Collections
Display, Exhibits and Exhibitions
Caring for the Visitor
Museum Education
Museum Management
Managing People
Marketing
Museum Security, including Disaster Preparedness
Illicit Traffic issues

I’ve copied the chapter headings on to my notebook so I can drill them into my brain.

So, what’s it a museum of? We’ll find out.

(I’m keeping people anonymous for now, since this site is a bit new and I haven’t asked permission to identify anyone.)

You may also be interested to listen to the Gin and Innovation #005 podcast from Strange Telemetry (George Voss and Justin Pickard talking to James Bridle about copper and museums) that I’m listening to right now, as I write this post.