Cultural Trends – Page 3 – American Alliance of Museums

We Saw the Future, Now What?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Guzel duChateau is the CFM Coordinator and AAM’s New Media Specialist. She also leads the association’s Emerging Museum Professionals group. CFM works closely with the EMPs since (after all) they are the museum professionals of the future! …
Mining MyCulture: serving the community of creative consumers

By Elizabeth Merritt

The CFM report Museums & Society 2034 explored a trend we dubbed “MyCulture”—a rising generation demonstrating an extraordinarily high level of creative output and creative consumption. This week’s guest blogger, Allison Thurman, …
Help Build the Collections of The Universal Museum of Creative Matter!

By Elizabeth Merritt

If you got up right now and walked around your workplace/house/campus/neighborhood, what evidence would you find of small, mundane, creative acts? Why do I ask? I never thought I’d say this, but I am starting a museum. About …
An Alternate Future for Museums: Part I

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week, global brand strategist Jonathan Salem Baskin contributes the first in a series of visions about the future of museums. His book Histories of Social Media will be coming out later this month. Jonathan connected with me when he …
Engaging and Empowering New Immigrants through Art

By Elizabeth Merritt

AAM’s recently released forecasting report Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums highlights the gap between current museum audiences and the majority minority future of American society. The sobering statistics are leavened …
The Future of Reality

By Elizabeth Merritt

I highly recommend this talk, When Games Invade Real Life, by Jesse Schell . It’s worth taking half an hour to plonk yourself down with a soda and let him blow your mind. Museum-ers will find this lecture particularly heartening because, …
Mapping the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

The Institute for the Future and Business for Social Responsibility have released their Sustainability Outlook Map charting four potential stories of the future. The map explores ways of approaching challenges to the environmental, social …
Grab the Popcorn and Settle in for 2010—Year of All Things Local

By Elizabeth Merritt

Futurist Faith Popcorn’s predictions for 2010. She declares it will be a year of Local Cocooning. See her observations on the growing preference for “Locotainment” –for example, attendance at minor-league baseball games at the expense of …
Museums as Aggregators?

By Elizabeth Merritt

This guest post is contributed by Allyson Lazar, museum consultant and freelance registrar based in Los Angeles, Calif. You can follow Allyson’s musings at her blog Two Ls and A Y. Reporter Sandra Hughes of CBS ends her video article …
Towards a New Mainstream?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Museums & Society 2034, this figure always makes museum folk sit up and take notice. Changing composition of America (U.S. Census Bureau/Reach Advisors) It dramatizes the growing disconnect between the population of the U.S., which is …