Museomix – basically putting every skill possible in a mixing bowl and mashing it up. It’s awesome!
What can I say? I walked into Enginuity, Coalbrookdale one Friday morning, not knowing what to
expect. When I had volunteered myself for three days ‘remixing Enginuity’ I took a leap of faith. I
love museums, art and everything in between. How hard can it be?
Well…the first challenge was met. We were allowed to propose what we want to see happen to a
few areas of the Coalbrookdale section of the museum i.e. the ‘Old Blast Furnace’, ‘Museum or Iron’
and of course ‘Enginuity’. The first person, Rosie Clarke stood up and said something on stage and
my heart started to pound, I got the sweats. I was going to stand up. I had an idea bursting to come
out!
I’m a scientist and of course I thought ‘I’m going to have to “science” this and make it fun too!’. So
I said that we should show the Old Blast Furnace as it used to be. Make some loud bangs, some
animations a children’s’ trail. What I want to do is pull people in. History and science should be
interactive, immersive and thought-provoking.
The second challenge was the ‘dating’ bit. This is where people grill you for more info on what your
ideas are and you have to recruit people with the relevant skills to make it happen! It is scary and
fun also!
The third challenge is making it happen. It was a blur. I and five other people slaved over laptops,
cardboard cuttings, cad-cam machines in the FabLab (that bit is cool, but some of our cardboard set
on fire!!). Three days. Longer than ten hours, set-backs too. An amazing feeling, remixed museums,
lots of new friends and lots and lots of coffee and cake. Don’t forget the important cake part. Not
many words can describe how much fun it was, how tired we all were. But, I’m just going to go with
awesome!
I also learned that what I enjoy is communicating about science, art and history. Mixing fields of
knowledge and figuring out how best to present them to the world, never thinking that you could
mix them until my Museomix experience. Museomix took me on journey, showed me I had some
skills I didn’t even know existed. It will do the same for you.