Center for the Future of Museums Blog

The Center for the Future of Museums Blog shares musings on the future of museums and society.

Read Dispatches from the Future of Museums online!

Get more resources from the Center for the Future of Museums.

Explore all Publications from the Alliance.

Explore the AAM Resource Library by topic, and further filter by subtopic or resource types to find what matters most to you!

Futurist Friday: An Anthology of Climate Fiction

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here’s an extra special treat for your Futurist Friday: “Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction” was just released as a free digital download by the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative (ICF) at Arizona …
Advancing Equity Through Arts and Culture

By Elizabeth Merritt

HI, Nicole here! Earlier this month, I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion held by Cool Culture, a New York City cultural organization that encourages arts education by providing free access to local arts institutions for …
Futurist Friday: Immersing Yourself in Your Fears

By Elizabeth Merritt

Today’s video–the Many Sad Fates of Mr. Toledano–is longer than my usual FF suggestion, but it is so sad, weird and thought-provoking I’m serving it up anyway. It would be well worth taking 24 minutes during lunch, …
The Future of Ownership

By Elizabeth Merritt

When it comes to collecting, museums are at the very end of a long chain of decisions. Before that new acquisition comes under the registrar’s pen, someone had to create an object, purchase or collect it, enabling it to eventually wend its …
Spontaneous, object-based fun with MuseumProv

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’m always on the lookout for entrepreneurs finding and filling open economic niches in and around museums. Previously, on the Blog, Nick Gray has shared how Museum Hack is building its business on the market for fun, irreverent, social …
The Future is Diverse

By Elizabeth Merritt

Today’s guest post is jointly authored by members of the 2016 cohort of the History Museum Fellows Program—a partnership between the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) that engages students in studying the …
Playing in the Museum Sandbox

By Elizabeth Merritt

Readers of CFM’s TrendsWatch reports and followers of this Blog will know of my fascination with the emerging business model of museums running co-working spaces. It’s such a genius use of museum resources (staff expertise, visitors, …
Futurist Friday: Emotional Intelligence

By Elizabeth Merritt

For your Friday future-break, here is a lovely short film by Dennis Sungmin Kim, exploring a future in which artificial intelligence has been supplemented by “artificial emotion.” ei: emotional intelligence from Dennis Sungmin …
FutureProofing Natural History Collections

By Elizabeth Merritt

When the Alliance chose financial sustainability as one of three areas of focus for our new strategic plan, I gravitated to one of the hardest challenges of all: how can we help create financially sustainable models for supporting …
What If Educators Ran a Museum?

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’ve been intrigued by the El Segundo Museum of Art since I first read about it in the Los Angeles Times when the museum opened in 2013. That article emphasized ESMoA’s focus on arts education, noting that four public schools are within …