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  • Four Ways of Seeing the Future

    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

    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?

    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

    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 …
  • Tweeting about a Bright Future

    Next week my colleagues and I at the Alliance will publish the second scenario in the set of future fictions that make up TrendsWatch 2018: The Planning Edition. This next installment, titled Fragmentation, explores a dystopian world …
  • Beyond the Block: Empowering Incarcerated Artists

    As I noted in TrendsWatch 2017, museums’ communities are being buffeted by the economic, cultural, and political fallout from current inequities in the justice system. Increasingly, museums are being called on to play a role in addressing …
  • Join me in Detroit to Explore the Future of Immersive Practice

    I’ve spent the past week designing some futurist exercises for a convening the Alliance is organizing at Detroit Institute of Arts, September 6-7. My colleagues and I are organizing Immersion in Museums: AR, VR or Just Plain R?, an intense …
  • Futurist Friday: Redemptive VR

    Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination has released the first story in its Crowd Futures project. In this experiment in collaborative storytelling,  authors and illustrators will invite members of an …
  • Leveling the Playing Field at Sugar Hill

    I fell in love with the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling back in 2014, when I read that Broadway Housing Communities’ brief to architect David Adjaye for this affordable housing project included a preschool AND …

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