Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: MICRO
A visitor examines the MICRO mollusk museum.

Good things come in small packages, even museums, as we saw in this 2013 post. Since then, enthusiasm for micro museums has only increased, as Margaret Carrigan reports at the Observer.

“When scientist Amanda Schochet and designer Charles Philipp unofficially started MICRO, they wanted to make the world’s smallest museum about mollusks, a passion of Schochet’s.

“They realized that might be easy, considering there were no real mollusk museums at all. But as they started developing content and design, the pair realized that even small museums could have a big impact.

“In a year-and-a-half, they’ve created five 6-foot-tall natural history museums that have been installed around New York City, with the latest unveiled in mid-December at the Ronald McDonald House on the Upper East Side. The goal for Schochet and Philipp is to foster equal access to fundamental knowledge by creating installations that can be found outside of the traditional museum setting. …

“With intentions to become the most-visited museum in the country within five years … Schochet and Philipp plan to debut a new MICRO museum module every year, starting with the core sciences before delving into math and art. Their first physics edition, the Museum of Perpetual Motion, [was scheduled to] launch in early February. …

“Philipp: It started as a kind of tongue-in-cheek idea just between my partner, Amanda, and I. Amanda is a computational ecologist and knew there was a really rich history of mollusks in New York, especially oysters. So when she first moved here a few years ago, we started looking into whether we could go to a museum about mollusks. But we couldn’t find one, so we joked that if we made the smallest mollusk museum it would also de facto be the largest. …

“It wasn’t until we had a four-hour wait in a doctor’s office that it seemed like there could really be a market for something like this. There was a captive audience right in front of us looking for entertainment, and something to distract them that wasn’t just whatever rerun was on the office television. It was then we realized a mini-museum could have an impact, and we bounced the idea off some friends who worked in museums who really saw some sort of potential.

“We started doing some research and found that something like 90 percent of museum visitors across the U.S. are non-Hispanic whites. We also found that there are 135 museums in Manhattan, but in the Bronx — which has a comparable population — there are only eight. These both seemed like problems that could be addressed by bringing more museums to areas where there were few institutions with larger populations of minorities. And one way to do that was make small museums that could be installed anywhere. …

“We don’t have enough room in MICRO to get into a lot of history and context, so we have to be really mindful about how to present information and how best to do it that would entice the average passerby: How do we make someone with little knowledge of the subject who is perhaps just in the middle of running an errand and totally focused on the day-to-day stuff they need to be doing interested and curious enough to spend 10 minutes learning?

“We’ve come up with some interesting ways of solving that. In the mollusk museums, we’ve installed an eye-catching hologram in the base of it that boasts a digital aquarium. And we chose to use recognizable B-movie alien characters as a way of introducing mollusks to the viewer, since we found that many of them are based on these organisms because they seem so otherworldly.” More here.

I love that they want to get their museums into the Department of Motor Vehicles. Now that is an idea whose time has come!

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