So this museum geek walks into an academic research meeting…
Earlier this month I was in London, participating in the Diversity, (In)equality and Differences workshop organized by the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities. As I shared in an earlier post, I was one of about …
Monday Musing: Thinking the Unthinkable
The other week I included a sobering story from the New Yorker in Dispatches from the Future of Museums*. The Really Big One, by Kathryn Shulz, looks at the Cascadia fault line that runs for 700 miles down the coast of the Pacific …
Futurist Friday: Rise of the (Cute, Self-aware) Robots
Have you seen Ex Machina yet? I watched it on a flight back from London. Its depiction of artificial intelligence is way, way ahead of the actual state of the field, but this week we saw a hint, just a tiny bit of evidence, that we may be …
Notes from the Team: An Introduction, or Why Predict the Future, Anyway?
I am so pleased to introduce a new member of the CFM team—Nicole Ivy will be working with me for the next two years, supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. I invited Nicole to introduce herself today—you …
Futurist Friday: Seeing the Bigger Picture
You can follow FiveBooks (& their cutemanatee mascot) on Twitter@five_books Today, for your weekly fix of futurism, I recommend you bop over to the Five Books site to read this wonderful interview with Andrew Curry, director of The …
Wearable Technology in the Body Metrics Exhibition
In TrendsWatch 2015 I cited The Tech Museum of Innovation for their creative exhibition on wearables called Body Metrics. We are pleased to bring you an update on the exhibition from Romie Littrell, Curator / Project Director – …
Stitching Together Open Collections Data
In TrendsWatch 2015 I cited last year’s CitStitch Hackathon as an example of natural history museums collaborating with the public to create open datasets about collections. So I was super happy to open an email from Robert Guralnick, …
Monday Musing: Field Trips & Videoconferencing
Monday musings are usually my way of sharing “brain blorts”: brief, off-the-cuff thoughts about something I have read recently, both to help clarify my thinking an in the hopes of generating discussion and response. I give …
Futurist Friday: the Future of Work, and Happinesss
In a recent article in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson refers to work as the “unofficial religion of America.” Thompson is the latest in a long lineage of prognosticators envisioning a future in which most people don’t have …
The Museum of 20??
One great thing about having a growing circle of future-oriented peeps is that we swap and share opportunities to engage in future-think. This past spring I had to turn down an invitation to join a fabulous group of people to discuss my …
