Center for the Future of Museums Blog

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Decolonizing the Museum Mind

By Frank Howarth

At the heart of modern museum work is the tension between our mission to preserve the past, and a moral obligation to confront the bias and inequities entangled with that inheritance. The history, mindset, and material culture of …
Crowdsourcing a Conference on Creative Aging

By Elizabeth Merritt

Would your museum like to host a national convening on museums and creative aging? Rather than figuring out the best site for such a meeting on our own, my colleagues and I at the Alliance are inviting you to speak up. Let’s call it …
Exploring the Explosion of Museum AI

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here are five good reasons you should join me in Miami Nov 1-2 to explore how museums can use artificial intelligence to fuel their work (illustrated by recent news): AI can help users in and out of the museum explore collections in new …
The Future is Climate

By Sarah Sutton

Until we perfect my AI-powered digital avatar, I rely on an informal network of correspondents to cover critical events taking place around the globe. In today’s guest post, Sarah W. Sutton reports from the Global Climate Action Summit …
Futurist Friday: Poetic Lions

By Elizabeth Merritt

As I prepare for the Alliance convening “New Intelligences,” I found this gem of an AI-powered art project installed this summer in Trafalgar Square. “Please Feed the Lions” is an interactive sculpture created by …
Meet Me in Miami to Explore Museums and AI

By Elizabeth Merritt

Right now I’m working on the agenda for Museums and New Intelligences, the Alliance’s second Knight Foundation-funded mini-conference exploring museum applications of emerging technologies. I hope you will join me at the Pérez Museum …
Four Ways of Seeing the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

We’re halfway through the serial publication of CFM’s set of scenarios for museum planning! Bright and dark versions of the year 2040, crowdsourced from the hopes and fears of AAMers, are available now, and our third scenario will be …
A Suggestion Box is Not Going to Fix a Riot

By Calder Zwicky

I love a good immersive futurist exercise. One of the earliest CFM events involved recruiting museum people to create museum narratives for Superstruct, the Institute for the Future’s Massive Multi-player Online Forecasting game. But …
Collections 2030 – What Future for Museum Collections in the UK?

By Alistair Brown

One of the five pillars of the Alliance’s strategic plan is global thinking. We know that US museums can become stronger by learning from their colleagues around the world. Case in point: what can we learn about the future of collections …
Capturing the Spirit of the Field Museum

By Megan Williams

One of my current projects is helping museums figure out how to develop new mission-related-income streams. In 2016, I helped develop and teach a workshop at which staff from natural history museums worked on ideas to create products and …