Keeping up with the 2013 Trends

Posted on Apr 4, 2013

I hope you’ve had a chance to download TrendsWatch 2013, which we released last month. Phil Katz and I did a Town Hall webcast last week, presenting a brief overview of the report–you can access a recording of that event here.

I hope you will follow along with us in the coming year as we track the six trends pegged in the report:

The Changing Shape of Giving (#philanthropy)
3-D Printing (#3Dprinting)
The Great Unbundling–the rise of microcredentials in education (#futureofeducation)
When Stuff Talks Back–the so-called Internet of Things (#iot)
Disconnecting to Reconnect–unplugging from our hyperconnected world (#digitaldetox)
The Urban Renaissance (#urbanfutures)

Here are some ways you can keep up with the news on these topics:

Follow CFM on Pinterest. We have created a board for each trend, and will related images as we come across them. (Remember, these images link back to the original sources, so you can track back to the full stories they represent.)

Follow CFM on Twitter. I’ll tweet links to stories. Many of these will not appear in our weekly e-newsletter, Dispatches from the Future of Museums, because if we fill Dispatches with stories related to the TW ’13 trends, we won’t have room for the stories that may become TW ’14! But I do also encourage you to
Subscribe to Dispatches, because we will feature some stories related to the TW ’13 trends. Besides, you can start helping us think about what we should highlight next year.
Keep an eye on this blog. I will be inviting guest bloggers from inside and outside the museum field to write posts digging into each of the trends in more detail. (Heck, take a moment to “become a member.” I’m not sure what that does for you, exactly, but I enjoy seeing the faces of our readers in the right hand navigation bar.)
Come to the Alliance annual meeting: Phil and I will present a session on TrendsWatch, and CFM is organizing a 3-D printing demo for the Alliance Showcase in MuseumExpo (more on that in future posts). Also, I will post my yearly “Guide to the Future at the Annual Meeting” highlighting sessions related to the trends.
Watch for future Town Hall webcasts on the trends related to philanthropy, microcredentialing and the urban renaissance. Schedule coming soon.

And please, be an active part of the process! When you read stories that confirm or challenge our forecast that these trends will be important and influential, or shed light on how they are playing out, please send them along. If you have a blog post welling up inside, let me know that as well.

Elizabeth Merritt, Founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums

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