Participatory Design – American Alliance of Museums

#AAM2017 Preview: using comics to have difficult conversations in museums

By Elizabeth Merritt

Greetings! Sage here. I have had the pleasure of working with Smithsonian Exhibits designer and comic book artist Evan Keeling for the past two years. Now we’ve developed an amazing panel of comic artists, educators and scholars from …
EXTREME EXHIBIT MAKEOVER: History Museum Meets Reality TV

By Elizabeth Merritt

Sometimes people who work in small museums take me to task about some of the technologies I highlight in CFM forecasts (“we can’t afford that!”) When this happens, I point out it’s never really about the technology—it’s about the human …
Four Ways of Seeing the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

Last July, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child project and co-founder of MIT Media Lab, keynoted at the WorldFuture 2013 conference. In the ten minute extract of his talk embedded below, he offers four ways of looking …
We Hacked a Museum Exhibition

By Elizabeth Merritt

You may have been following Nina Simon’s account of the Hack the Museum Camp recently hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, or perhaps you read Paul Orselli’s letter from camp. Today Maria Mortati, who facilitated the event …
Pop-ups and Emerging Museums

By Elizabeth Merritt

Recent posts on the CFM Blog on pop-up museums & exhibits have provoked a lot of interest, so I invited Katie Spencer, executive director of the Museum of Durham History, to contribute yet another perspective. Her museum, still under …
Finding Community: Engaging Diverse Audiences in a Historic House

By Elizabeth Merritt

In April, 2007, a small but influential group of historic house professionals, association and foundation staff gathered at Kykuit, the historic Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hills, NY, for the Forum on Historic Site Stewardship in the …
Integrating Collaboration and Technology to Create a Crowdsourced Experience

By Elizabeth Merritt

I attended the Media & Technology Committee’s MUSE awards ceremony at the AAM annual meeting in Minneapolis Saint Paul a few weeks ago. The award-winning projects illustrate a number of the cultural and technological trends CFM is …
FLUX | AAM – CFM

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week, guest blogger Peter Kimelman, founding director of the FLUX Foundation, previews his group’s participatory art project at the upcoming AAM annual meeting. One of PK’s recent projects was conducting research on wine and design …
Open Authority & the Future of Museum Ethics

By Elizabeth Merritt

Lori Byrd Phillips is the U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedian in Residence at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. As a museum studies graduate student at Indiana University-Purdue …
Steampunk, Crowdfunding and the Power of Social Media

By Elizabeth Merritt

Or, How One Exhibit Company Pulled A Brass Elephant Out Of A Hat This week’s guest post is by Peter Overstreet. Pete and his wife, Cat Taylor, founded the exhibit and event design company Aeronaut Productions LLC. Pete was a full-time …