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Revisiting the Borgias
This Throwback Thursday post revisits an issue I touched on back at the beginning of the financial crisis, in 2009: how the decline in traditional funding sources and the increasing inequality of wealth in American are shaping the behavior … -
Playing with Food: A Recipe for Success from the Hartford Symphony Orchestra
In 2011, CFM launched Feeding the Spirit, an exploration of the relationships between museums, food & community. That project lives on in a number of ways—most notably, it played a role in the launch of the ongoing Let’s Move Museums … -
Monday Musings: The End of the Blockbuster Era
Today’s brief musing was prompted by a story I included in our weekly e-newsletter Dispatches from the Future of Museums last week—a video clip of a panel discussion on the Future of the Museum, hosed by the Boston Athenaeum that brought … -
Futurist Friday: Hana Yakiniku
Introducing Hana Yakiniku–an internet connected olfactory device that lets users generate food smells. As this video points out, it has all sorts of applications: for impecunious students, making cheap food smell like a fancy meal … -
Revisiting the Intelligent City
This is the first in a series of “Throwback Thursdays,” revisiting content from the Blog that continues to resonate with recent news. A story from last week’s edition of Dispatches from the Future of Museums on how … -
Small Museums in an Age of Scale
In November, the Smithsonian’s Michael Edson threw down the gauntlet here on the Blog, with Museums in an Age of Scale. Michael challenged museums to dream big, especially when it comes to education. He concluded: “Museums accomplish … -
Monday Musings: Personalized Learning
I love seeing signals that optimistic scenarios of the future are coming true. One of my favorite bright stories of the future is the “Vibrant Learning Grid” in the KnowledgeWorks 2020 Forecast on education. In that scenario, developed in … -
A Month of Blogging
February will be a month of experimentation here on the Blog. I’m going to try a “Blog a day” format Monday thru Friday, to find out if that schedule is a) useful to you, the readers and b) sustainable (as in, can I keep up that pace?) … -
Spend Some Time Daydreaming the Future
Humans are natural storytellers. That should make my work easy, because the apex of strategic foresight is using storytelling to plan for the future. Futurists call these stories “scenarios,” and while they have a very serious purpose, … -
Why You Don’t Want To Be Nice
I’ve been using this graphic in talks lately when talking about successful financial models for museums. The point being that if your organization provides experiences or services that are addictive or essential, or better yet, both, you …
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