Here’s our weekly round-up of our favorite things that were said about museums this week: the good, the bad, and the really quite strange! But first, a sad piece of local news. The Higgins Armory Museum will close in December of this year. Their amazing …
The MFA’s Education department is offering a fantastic opportunity to learn and teach in the museum next year. They have put out a call for applicants to join their Gallery Talk Lecturers. It’s a great opportunity for masters students to get experience teaching in the galleries …
by columnist Cira Brown
Last month, Artisan’s Asylum, a community craft studio in Somerville (and one of the largest in the world), held a weekend conference entitled, How To Build A MakerSpace. The “Make Movement” is borne out of the Do It Yourself philosophy, which empowers individuals to learn fabrication skills, both technical and digital. Artisan’s Asylum holds classes on skills ranging from TIG welding to sewing, programming to bicycle maintenance, and provides many of the tools needed for these tasks. The Asylum also rents out space, mostly in 50-100 square foot allocations, and low walls are used as dividers. This arrangement creates a very open environment, resulting in a dynamic community where you can walk around and see a host of various projects, all in different stages of completion. There is even an ongoing project to create a 4000-pound, 18 foot wide, ridable hexapod robot named Stompy.
So, more generally, what is a MakerSpace? Taken from the Artisan’s Asylum website, they are:
“…community centers with tools. Makerspaces combine manufacturing equipment, community, and education for the purposes of enabling community members to design, prototype and create manufactured works that wouldn’t be possible to create with the resources available to individuals working alone. These spaces can take the form of loosely-organized individuals sharing space and tools, for-profit companies, non-profit corporations, organizations affiliated with or hosted within schools, universities or libraries, and more. All are united in the purpose of providing access to equipment, community, and education, and all are unique in exactly how they are arranged to fit the purposes of the community they serve.
Makerspaces represent the democratization of design, engineering, fabrication and education. They are a fairly new phenomenon, but are beginning to produce projects with significant national impacts; notable projects and companies to emerge from makerspaces include the Pebble Watch (a programmable watch whose team is the recipient of the largest Kickstarter campaign in history), MakerBot (creators of a low-cost 3D printer that’s revolutionizing the entire rapid prototyping industry), and Square (a painless payment gateway enabling small businesses to collect money easily worldwide), just to name a few.”
At the How To Build A MakerSpace event, keynote speaker Dale Dougherty (editor and publisher of Make Magazine and co-founder of Maker Faire) mentioned the importance of forging a relationship with museums several times. Museums already have an established presence in the community and many museum missions overlap with the goals of makerspaces. The museum realm has also been eying the Maker Movement, as evidenced by these recent articles and conference discussions:
Talking Points: Museums, Libraries, and Makerspaces
by The Institute of Museums and Library Services, September 2012
What’s the Point of a Museum Maker Space?
Discussion Panel at the Museum Computer Network Conference, November 2012
Unstaffed Maker Spaces? Don’t Event Think About It!
Museum Commons blog, January 2013
Maker Space: Cool New Attraction at New York Hall of Science
Mommy Poppins blog, April 2012
Not only do MakerSpaces provide a great extension for educational programming, but the potential for exhibit fabrication and prototyping is radically altered as well. I know of several people at Artisan’s Asylum who were contracted by museums to build exhibit components, and the Museum of Science even rents a space as well. I am even using the 3D Printer at the Asylum to create my own custom spinning tops for an educational demonstration on gyroscopic navigation at the MIT Museum. I’ve designed these tops with differing moments of inertia to provide visitors with an interactive experience on the concepts of angular momentum and precession. Maker Spaces enable and empower museum educators and exhibit developers to relatively quickly and cheaply augment their educational offerings. In my next column I’ll be describing this endeavor more in depth.
I believe that this is only the beginning of the overlap between MakerSpaces and museum education/exhibition fabrication. Just this evening, in my Exhibition Planning class, I learned that one of my classmates was helping organize a Maker Faire at the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire. There are many exciting and innovative happenings in this field, and I will be providing further examples in columns to follow.
As an additional note, I should also mention that I am a member and renter of Artisan’s Asylum and I’m happy to give tours to those who are interested! Contact me at CiraLouise AT gmail DOT com. The class listing for each month can also be found on the Asylum website.
by columnist Madeline Karp For those of you not up on your children’s authors, this weekend marked the 99th birthday of beloved children’s author, poet and illustrator Theodor Geisel a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. The Please Touch Museum celebrated by reading Dr. Seuss’s best-loved books at story …
Here’s our weekly round-up of our favorite things that were said about museums this week: the good, the bad, and the really quite strange! But first, worth reading is an interesting op-ed from a Yale University senior about the “sanitized” presentations of museums that she’s …
by professor Kenneth C. Turino
Using historic houses as holiday rentals is nothing new in Europe. The National Trust of Britain, the Landmark Trust of Britain, and English Heritage among others rent historic properties from cottages to portions of castles. Here in the United States the idea has been slow to develop, but this is changing. Last October, my partner and I rented a Lockkeeper’s House on the C&O canal near Washington, D.C., operated by the C&O Canal Trust in partnership with the National Park Service, the owner of the building and the park it is in. The house was restored to a 1950′s appearance, with period furniture that could actually be used. Each of the 6 rental houses is restored to reflect a different aspect of the canal’s history. What a wonderful way to experience the history of the area and the C&O canal. In the house, we found information on the house and canal and guide books on the history of the canal. We used one book on our walk along the canal into Georgetown. We learned a tremendous amount about the history of the canal as we enjoyed the perfect fall weather, along with the many people who were jogging, walking or bicycling on the towpath. That evening we invite about 20 friends to the house for a party. They explored the house, sat on the porch overlooking the canal, and enjoyed the ambiance. The next morning we left our comments in the guest book and were delighted to read about other people’s experience who came here to celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, weddings and simply the atmosphere: “Thank you C&O Trust for restoring these historic houses and sharing them with sojourners who long to enjoy the vision and reality of this place birthed by the founders of our nation.” Historic houses as holiday rentals are just another way that people can engage in history. It is something we in the field should seriously consider as an option, especially since historic sites are looking for new ways to engage audiences. Some additional rental examples are Rudyard Kippling’s house in Vermont, Naulakha, (www.landmarktrustusa.org/) where he wrote Captain’s Courages and the Jungle Book. Or one where my family stayed, officers’ housing at Fort Worden State Park, Port Townsend, WA (www.parks.wa.gov/fortworden/accommodations/), a former military base with accommodations for family vacations, conferences, reunions and retreats. Visitors may choose from buildings including century-old officers’ housing, a castle and special one-room houses. Try historic house rentals, a different way to enjoy history.
Read another post about the C&O Canal: Life on the Canal. This post originally appeared in History Places.
Interested in Historic Houses? Check out Kenneth Turino and Barbara Silberman’s course, Revitalizing Historic House Museums, this summer at Tufts!