This week we are pleased to announce that Sarah Koik is contributing to Ligature Journal Issue One. Sarah directs the science education programming for the Haas Centre for Public Service at Stanford University, California. She also describes herself as a potter, accordion player and intrepid traveller (she just returned from a trip to the Arctic Circle).

Sarah’s career has been as an educator, designer and project manager for a variety of museums, most recently for the Exploratorium, a hands-on museum of science, art, and human perception in San Francisco. But she is going to be talking to us about a museum she created: The Grandma Museum, a digital archive that celebrates the gifts that are passed to us by our grandmothers.

There is a wide range of items to be found in The Grandma Museum, from forks to books to dish towels to a box of rocks; each item uniquely different and beautiful with its own story to tell. Sarah explores the emotional relationship with the things we receive and are gifted, and how they fit into our life. She finds meaning in objects that we often don’t see meaning in and encourages us to stop seeing the stuff we clutter our lives with as a bad thing.