Ingrid Abbott, 11, could not find a butterfly museum near her Utah home, so she created her own out of a cardboard box. Credit Ben Abbott
By Richard Morgan, Jan. 9, 2021
The main thing to know about Ingrid Abbott, 11, a fifth grader in the modest mountain town of Orem, Utah, is that she is really into butterflies.
She dressed as a monarch butterfly for Halloween last year. She checks books out of her local library about butterflies. And she watches National Geographic documentaries about them. She wishes there were a butterfly museum in her town, but Orem doesn’t have one. So Ingrid corrected the situation: She built her own Museum of Butterflies out of a cardboard box.
“It’s kind of like school, except fun,” she said. “A lot more fun. You don’t have to stare at a screen. You can be creative.”
Ingrid used a free D.I.Y. museum kit offered by Micro, a company that builds refrigerator-size compact museums on specific topics. There’s also Museum in a Box, whose D.I.Y. projects are sorted by age (5 to 9, 10 to 14, and over 14). And there are plenty of random YouTube videos for D.I.Y. mini-museums. But the idea is at least as old as the wunderkammern, or cabinet of curiosities which dates back to 16th-century Europe. Grab a box. Pick a topic. And have fun with it.
“Nobody is making them do this,” said Autumn Mortali, who wrote the Micro D.I.Y. guidebook, coordinated with educators and designers on the project, and is now the company’s special projects adviser. “So how can we build this in a way that they’ll be independently motivated to do it?”
In our socially distant era, tactile learning has especially fallen by the wayside. It is not a good time for baking soda volcanoes, Styrofoam solar systems and potato batteries. D.I.Y. museums, then, step into a pandemic arts-and-crafts vacuum for children. But cardboard museums are not just beefed-up shoe box dioramas. Accompanying worksheets provide what Micro calls “structured curiosity,” teaching students about fact-checking, design, audience, how to ask better questions and how to find better answers.
D.I.Y. museums expand on the #museumathome and #museumfromhome hashtags that had people posting 60-second videos about household objects and curios as lockdowns began in Britain in the spring — and on both the Traveling Trunks introduced by the Smithsonian in February and the Free the Museum movement, which aims to create museum-like experiences in everyday places.
Here’s how to build a better box.
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“This is more like fun and what I want to do,” said Seymour Kankel, who made a dinosaur museum in Washington, D.C.Credit...Lila Guterman
Get extracurricular.
Start with a simple question: What are you interested in that you’re not learning about in school? For 13-year-old Madison No in Pasadena, Calif., that was film history. “There’s no art class,” she said. “We just do plays sometimes. But I don’t get to learn this in school. I wanted to do something that I would only get to learn on my own.” She has a habit of pursuing her interests, as she had done with Greek mythology. Her favorite myth — of Pandora — taught her the power of a box.
“It shouldn’t feel like work,” said Sara Cardello, head of education at Smithsonian Libraries. “It should be something the kid is excited about: ‘You’re into pirates? Great! Find everything around the house that’s pirate-y. Read more about pirates.’”
Be Marie Kondo Jr. or try time travel.
If you’re having trouble picking a topic, channel your inner Marie Kondo and look around for something that sparks joy. “You can museum from your kitchen,” said Sacha Coward, the museum consultant and escape room artist behind the viral British hashtag campaign, who uses “museum” as a verb. “Look around your house, the things hanging on your walls, tucked in your cupboards.”
Imagine what people 1,000 years from now might wonder about life in 2021. Ask your parents or grandparents about how different their childhood homes and lives were before Netflix or video games or microwaves or air-conditioning. Mr. Coward asks “What in your house is worth adding to a museum of the future?”
Make a knowledge wish list.
Once you’ve decided on a topic, brainstorm questions you have. In the Bronx, the 13-year-old twins Daniel and Daniela Cuatlayo joined their siblings to explore an everyday treat, resulting in their Museum of Ice Cream (their oldest sister has worked for Micro as a student adviser). “In our generation, all we know about ice cream is that it’s delicious,” Daniela said. “But how was it made? What was the first flavor?”
They discovered that some of the earliest flavors included asparagus, bread and grated cheese. “People think of ice cream as vanilla, strawberry, chocolate,” Daniel said. “Asparagus ice cream is something you’d never see unless you researched it. But we know it now because we educated ourselves.”
Pretend you’re a teacher.
Read up on the topic. Maybe your questions get answered, maybe they don’t. Maybe you get new questions and answers. A good test of what you’ve learned is to explain the topic to a family member almost as a teacher would. Pay attention to what excites you — and what excites them (that’s what you should put in the box).
Pick favorite aspects of your topic — for a pirate museum, it could be costumes, maps, ships, or treasure — and include them in the museum. As Seymour Kankel, 10, who, built a Museum of Sauropods and Diplodocoids in Washington, D.C., put it: “This is more like fun and what I want to do. I don’t really think of it as science. I just think of it as facts that are cool.”
Now, give the idea a home.
Choose a box that your hands can fit into. Amazon and other home-delivery boxes work well, and grocery or liquor stores often have boxes to give away.
Cut holes in the wall, adorn the flaps, or use them as entry doors. Draw or print images that explain your topic. Maybe glue some facts onto the box’s walls, like plaques at a museum. Think of the box as a house where your idea lives. Paint or color however you see fit. Inside, outside, on the flaps, however you want. Maybe there’s a Lego or Play-Doh sculpture. Or papier-mâché. Maybe your toys help you decorate your box.
What makes your box special? Find a wow factor. Ingrid used oil pastels to decorate the floor of her butterfly museum with the bright concentric circles seen on butterflies’ wings to ward off predators (formally called eyespots or ocelli). She also posted surprise facts about butterflies — that some migrations are so distant that only the grandchildren of butterflies that start the journey make it back, for example.
Share with a fellow expert.
Don’t fear sharing it with experts. “Museums have gotten better, at least online, at communicating with the public,” Mr. Coward said. “You can talk to the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum. You might have a conversation with a curator on the other side of the world.”
“It’s not about their pedigree; it’s about their passion,” he went on. “Any museum worth their salt will engage in a heartfelt way. They’ll say ‘That’s an amazing drawing of a dinosaur! Did you know they had feathers?’ rather than ‘Why didn’t you include feathers?’”
This is not just for children.
Mia Schillace-Nelson, 51, a museum exhibition creator in Minneapolis, made a D.I.Y. Museum of Slime Molds focusing on what’s commonly called “dog vomit” slime mold (she constructed artificial mold with polystyrene beads, glue and paint). “It’s such a departure because it’s a breath of fresh air in all the staleness of this year,” she said. “I hope folks have room in their conscious minds for some joy. I hope they make room. You have to reconnect with the kid in you.”