MICROMUSEUMS
Micromuseums is the first distributed museum – a fleet of six-foot tall, reproducible, cultural vessels that you might find in a waiting room, the DMV, lobby, or anywhere where there is underutilized space and people with time to kill. The mission of Micro — makers of Micromuseums — is make museums and learning accessible and free to all.
MICRO is on a mission to provide equal access to fundamental knowledge. In New York City, Manhattan has 85 museums. The Bronx has 8. The boroughs have the same population. Entry is often expensive, and audiences are narrow: across America, 90% of museum visitors are white.
MICRO’s venue partners are hospitals, transit hubs, developers, and more: people and organizations who want to make a difference, and share the adventure of science with their community.
We worked with the Micro founders to build out the branding and identity of the enterprise, to design the form and content of the first two museums, along all graphics, video, and print materials.
The first Micromuseum is titled the Smallest Mollusk Museum, and is a window into the world of our otherworldy invertebrate mollusk cousins. Across four sides and a dozen ‘exhibits’ within the museum, visitors are invited to empathize with these misunderstood creatures and how our human habits affect them, from visualizing the differences in our senses to grasping the solitude of the ocean octopus, and preparing ourselves for the next mass extinction of species.
Part of the development of the Smallest Mollusk Museum involved bespoke typographic treatments and illustrations that interpreted the strangeness of mollusk forms. Not all of these made it onto the final museum, but are some of my favorite parts of this exhibit.
The second Micromuseum produced was the Perpetual Motion Museum. M002, as we call it, examined the nature of energy in the universe through the lens of our peculiar human fascination with the impossible. Namely, the pursuit of perpetual energy, where energy is created rather than being dissipated.
There’s a lot here. A few other very talented craftspeople created the video elements and remarkable 3D zoetrope in the base, Ryan Dunn designed the brutalist structure, and I provided the graphics.
Visit micro.ooo to learn more about this organization.
