By Joe Imholte and Keith Braafladt May 5, 2023
Source: AAM
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This high level of engagement with cardboard eventually led SMM to host a “Cardboard Day,” which coincided with Global Cardboard Challenge’s “Day of Play” in 2015. The Global Cardboard Challenge is an annual celebration of creativity inspired by the short film, Caine’s Arcade.[1] At our Cardboard Day, there were a dozen or so cardboard-based activities spread throughout the museum. One of these “activities” was a 2,000-square-foot room equipped with tape and scissors and a giant pile of previously used cardboard boxes where visitors could free-build whatever they wanted.
Encouraged by what we saw, we devised an experiment: fill 4,000 square feet of unused temporary exhibition space with cardboard, tape, and scissors and watch what happens. For four consecutive weekends, visitors played with hundreds of used cardboard boxes while we observed, learned, and spent hours hauling cardboard used beyond reuse to the compactor. Based on the enthusiastic response, we hatched a plan: open Cardboard Gallery as a three-month temporary exhibition.
In such an open-ended space, some things visitors did took us by surprise. One notable example was when visitors started moving their creativity to the walls of the gallery, using the provided multicolored painter’s tape to write their names and create designs. Although our initial reaction was to take it all down each night, after a few days we decided to let it go. This wall art was another way in which visitors were creating open-ended experiences in the gallery, and it allowed them to make the space their own in ways that were off limits in other parts of the museum.
Another surprise was the amount of mess. We understood that the exhibition would entail significant cleaning and deconstruction, but the amount of scrap cardboard—pieces that were one to four inches in size—was far more than we expected, and more than floor staff could easily stay on top of. We assumed that visitors would waste cardboard by using only larger pieces, but they used small pieces as well, and as each use decreased a piece’s size, some unused scrap was inevitably created. These small bits were very hard to keep up with, and, in the end, we had to agree to a level of disarray in the exhibition that we did not allow in any other area of the museum.
In 2018, we even tried using leaf blowers and snow shovels to help manage the waste, but both proved ineffective as the cardboard scraps clung to the carpet.) When we let go of our desire to maintain a pristine space, we learned that a certain level of messiness actually encouraged folks to participate. Maintaining the right level of messiness, however, was tricky: if the “creative mess” became a “chaos room,” then the mess became a detractor. Evaluation data showed us that maintaining examples of previous visitors’ work–both simple and complex–served as an even stronger motivation for creativity. As a result, floor staff became dramaturges, working to find the right level of messiness to encourage participation and saving and staging examples for inspiration.
Cardboard City In 2019, SMM received a grant of more than $1 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue iterating on the cardboard makerspace design and, specifically, to study design strategies to support more novice makers, including groups–such as BIPOC families–that have been excluded from the modern maker movement.
The most recent versions of Cardboard Gallery, now called Cardboard City, continue to embrace open-ended creativity within a loose framework and the use of examples to support inventiveness, while highlighting familiar materials–tape and cardboard–for an easy, accessible making experience. New features include design prompts within five thematic areas to support novice makers in generating a starting idea. For example, the “city” theme allows for easy open-building opportunities around the question, “What does a city need?” Most of the thematic areas include a way to use or display final creations, generating opportunities to design or to leave creations behind to serve as examples for others.
Conclusion Over time, SMM has created two versions of the same exhibition: Cardboard Gallery, which, in essence, is a program that has morphed into an exhibition, and Cardboard City, which has transformed Cardboard Gallery into a more traditional, structured exhibition or makerspace. Cardboard City is significantly more expensive to produce than the original but remains less expensive than a typical, similarly scaled exhibition, particularly when built elements are reused over years and across programs. Through the lens of budget, both are highly engaging exhibitions that cost a fraction of what a typical exhibition of similar size would to produce or rent.
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