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!

Experiments in Virtual Reality at The Museum of Flight

By Elizabeth Merritt

TrendsWatch 2016 will go up on the web at the end of this week! And (spoiler alert) one of the topics I cover this year is the explosive rise of Augmented and Virtual Reality devices. The technology behind AR/VR is rapidly becoming more …
FFF: NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION HISTORIANS ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2040

By Elizabeth Merritt

<!—-> This week Kate Stoessel, a sixth grade Social Studies teacher in Houston sent us a creative story in the form of a conference keynote from the year 2040. She shares several future innovations in education and highlights …
Stacking the Futurist Deck

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’m the first to admit it can be hard to catapult from dealing with today’s urgent problems to thinking about the long-term future. Fortunately, futurists have developed many tools to help guide organizations through the process of …
What type of future do you envision for P-12 education?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Would you like to see your ideas about the future of education shared far beyond your local museum or school? What current P-12 issues are important to you? What works and where are the opportunities for change? Draft your story today and …
Future Friday Fiction!: The Wax

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week, our Future Friday Fiction work is by Joe Tankersley, a futurist. His story is set in New Orleans and imagines a future where a VR enhanced music program is developed by a museum. Check out the other entries here and submit your …
Museums and Fair Labor Practices

By Elizabeth Merritt

Fair wages, living wages, the CEO pay ratio, unpaid internships, short term contracts, unbiased hiring, outsourced work—labor issues are front and center in our field. TrendsWatch 2016 (which will come out at the end of this month) tackles …
Museums & Employment: Casting a Wider Net

By Elizabeth Merritt

Diversifying the museum workforce is going to involve all players in the labor market rethinking traditional assumptions. In her January guest post (“One Graduate’s Job Search Story”) Sophie Stein encourages recent …
Future Fiction Friday: It began with the bees.

By Elizabeth Merritt

Hi, this is Sylvea. I wanted to share a story from our Future Fiction Challenge…this one, by Lisa Alleman, an educator at Lakewood Historical Society in Lakewood, OH. Check out the other entries here and submit your story! If you would …
Lessons in Foresight

By Elizabeth Merritt

When I wooed the American Council of Learned Societies last year, proposing they assign CFM one of their public fellows, I promised that the Alliance would provide futurist training for the humanities post-doc that also matched our needs. …
The Future of Websites

By Elizabeth Merritt

CFM is a “skunkworks” for the Alliance, as well as an idea lab for the field. Sometimes we test drive things that may (or may not) work to assess whether they are promising practices for the association as a whole. Case in point: our …