When the Ancestors Call to You
When we think about barriers to change, practical issues like time, money, and legal issues often are top of mind. This can be true, for example, when museums talk about repatriation, whether voluntary or mandated by law. But often the …
ISO Stories about the Future of Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations
From the digital desk of Elizabeth Merritt, Vice President, Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums: Museum people are natural storytellers, attuned to making sense of the world through words, images, …
Twelve Museum Innovations in 2023
Dispatches from the Center for the Future of Museums is a museum newsletter like none other, offering far-reaching analysis of emerging social, technological, economic, environmental, and political trends and how they might impact our …
Seeding the Future at the New Children’s Museum
I’m a huge fan of speculative fiction—stories with the power to immerse us in the daily reality of possible futures deeply and viscerally. We can fall in love with fiction in a way we rarely love academic research or formal foresight. As a …
Curatorial Chatbot: An Experiment with AI at the Nasher Museum of Art
CFM has explored museum applications of artificial intelligence (AI) since 2017, notably business analytics, customer service, collections data analysis, and provenance research. Today on the blog, Julianne Miao tells us how the Nasher …
A Journey of Healing: Creating Co-Stewardship with Tribal Communities
What’s in a name? The language we use tells us who is speaking, from what perspective, and (implicitly), who controls the narrative. Names, in short, have power. Today on the blog, Caitlin Dichter, Exhibit Designer, & Nicole …
The Future of the Museum Store
This post was originally published in 2014 and is republished with updates. Read more about how to get involved in Museum Store Sunday taking place November 26, 2023! I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Museum Store Association …
Do You Like Podcasts about Museums? Want to Start Your Own?
One of the BEST PARTS of the virtual Future of Museums Summit is going to be the breakout sessions at the end of each day. Many of the moderators and speakers have volunteered to join attendees in virtual rooms later on the day of their …
Crushing on Our Summit Speakers
If I were a different age, I might be saying “OMG OMG!” (or possibly “squee!!!”) but being who I am I’ll just say that our speaker lineup for the virtual Future of Museums Summit is mass…
Peering Over the Next Horizon of Museum Practice
Why is it so hard to make change?! Even when we (museum people) know that parts of our work are in urgent need of reform, progress can be glacially slow.
In fact, that’s natural. Humans are hardwired for caution, and it often seems …
