A growing fleet of MICRO museums is reaching audiences who might never step inside a traditional cultural or science institution.
Who would have thought that tiny museums, not much bigger than a household refrigerator, could inspire a major rethink of how museums reach people across cities and remote areas? Not only that, but that these museums could attract a far more diverse audience than traditional science or cultural institutions?
The first MICRO museum prototype was built in 2016, and now a growing fleet is being rolled out and installed in public places in the US – libraries, hospital waiting rooms, laundromats, schools, malls, family court buildings, transit hubs. Built by New York-based non-profit, MICRO, these vending machine-sized museums have been so successful at reaching new audiences that hundreds of institutions are interested in collaborating with the project.
Charles Philipp was an animator in New York when he co-founded MICRO. He was working on advertising products that he didn’t really care about, and was looking for something with more meaning. “I started to get a bit older and I wanted to use my skillset to try to make the world better,” says Philipp, now head of partnerships at MICRO. “I figured that I could leverage a lot of the tools that I had learned from [advertising] – how to get people’s attention, how to draw people in – and use these to create more good in the world .”
A pivotal moment came when Philipp was sitting in a hospital waiting room with the person who would become the co-founder of MICRO, Amanda Schochet, a computational ecologist. They realised that it was the perfect place to engage more people in conversations about science, but was being sorely underutilised. “People were a little scared,” Philipp recalls. “They were watching terrible TV. They were playing Candy Crush on their phone. We were like, ‘Let’s build a tiny museum and put it in places like this.’”
The pair wanted to build learning spaces that did away with the imposing architecture of traditional museums, which can put some people off. “There are these grandiose cathedrals to knowledge, but a lot of people don’t feel like it’s their religion,” says Philipp. “They feel intimidated by the space.”
Museums are also often geographically restricted, rarely found in areas with a lower socioeconomic demography or those dominated by minority groups, says Philipp. “Almost 60% of adult visitors to the Smithsonian Museum have a graduate degree or higher, which only 15% of the broader population has,” he says. “In the US, 90% of museum visitors are white, but in our museums, the visitors are 90% non-white.”
As they were beginning to develop the idea, Philipp told Schochet he wanted to visit the smallest museum in the world. “She misheard it and goes, ‘You’re going to the Mollusk Museum?’ and got very excited about the idea of a mollusk museum,” Philipp laughs. “So, we looked it up and realised that there wasn’t a mollusk museum that we could go to, so we decided to make one.”
That mis-heard conversation inspired the theme of the first MICRO museum, the Smallest Mollusk Museum, which was developed with 41 scientists from all over the world, and placed in the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City in 2017. “Since the 1500s, of all the documented extinctions, over 40% have been mollusks,” says Philipp. “They’re going extinct faster than any other animal group.”
Just 2 meters high, Philipp and Schochet’s Mollusk Museum has a range of displays, activities and information related to mollusks. “It has holograms in the base at young-kid eye-level. So they get really excited and get glued at the hologram,” says Philipp. “There are hands-on activities right in the middle of the museum, so you can touch and pull and press buttons. The concepts get a little bit more sophisticated as you go up the museum.”
Small beginnings, huge reach
From that first museum, MICRO has developed its big, bold vision, and expanded into a non-profit organisation that aims to help local groups develop their own museums for public spaces. “Each of our museums can get 30,000 visitors a month in a public space,” says Philipp. “We realised that we could fundamentally change how people engage with museums to enable them to create a distributed museum experience that reaches a whole new audience.”
“After our Smallest Mollusk Museum, we developed a physics and engineering museum called the Perpetual Motion Museum, which is all about humanity’s age-old quest to capture and store energy and why it’s so difficult,” says Philipp. “Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed the Museum of Care, which is all about frontline healthcare workers and how you can create more equitable systems of care.”
MICRO has built eight replicas of the Smallest Mollusk Museum and distributed it around the US, and is producing replicas of the others. Designed with no rare or precious artifacts, and with a robustness to increase their longevity, they are being built with a modular system so that exhibits can be swapped out and changed regularly.
Philipp says the years of COVID-19 lockdowns helped them to expand their ideas about reaching people. “We were the only museum to stay open in the US throughout the pandemic because we were in the public hospital system,” he says. “But also, if our goal is to put museums where people are, then during COVID, people were at home, so we had to figure out ways to put museums at home. We created a guide that allowed people to turn empty Amazon boxes or cardboard boxes into a tiny museum.”
This idea blossomed into providing a series of downloadable resources to help communities create their own museums. The MICRO team is also now working with local communities and artists to curate new museums on the topic of misinformation. Philipp says groups can fundraise at a local level, for example, by launching a Kickstarter, to develop museums in their local area.
They can also help to curate content by ‘hacking’ existing museums and making them more relevant to local issues. “They can take an entire museum and turn it into something that they have an expertise in,” says Philipp, “whether that’s a coal-mining town in West Virginia or a mountain town in Laos.”
What’s been most rewarding, says Philipp, is seeing his vision of democratising museums come to life. “When you take museums off the pedestal and say it’s about the quality of the information, rather than the vaulted ceilings and marble, that’s where it really took on a life of its own,” he says.
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Story by Kylie Ahern