Recommended Reading – Page 6 – American Alliance of Museums

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 …
Want to Make a (Long) Bet On That?

By Elizabeth Merritt

It’s summer and things are slow, so sometimes Futurist Friday (my sporadic series of posts recommending reading & viewing) is going to fall earlier in the week. This week’s recommendation: the Long Now Foundation’s Long Bets site. …
Futurist Friday: Scanning the Crowdfunding Sites

By Elizabeth Merritt

I hope by now I’ve convinced you of the benefits of reading widely & eclectically, and of including “fringe” as well as mainstream sources in your scanning. Today’s Futurist Friday assignment: set aside 15 minutes to browse a …
Futurist Friday: Nonprofit Apartheid and the Overhead Myth

By Elizabeth Merritt

I posted some brief musings this past Monday about the blurring boundaries between nonprofit and for profit options for young professionals seeking to do good in their careers. In the comment section, “Albert Nonymous” posted a …
Futurist Friday: Summer Reading

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here’s what I have stacked on my nightstand. With a month or two lull from work travel, I might actually make it through these before the museum conference schedule revs up in the fall.“Who Owns the Future?” by Jaron …
Futurist Friday: The Great Inversion

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here’s a good medium-length read on the rise of the city (one of our feature topics in TrendsWatch 2013): an article by Edward Luce in the Chicago Tribune on The Future of the American City, documenting the revitalization of the urban core …
Futurist Friday: Interview with Garry Golden

By Elizabeth Merritt

Garry Golden is a professional futurist. (Yes, it is a profession. I myself am a proud member of the Association of Professional Futurists.) I met Garry through our shared academic lineage–he is a full fledged graduate of the …
Futurist Friday: Stranger than Fiction

By Elizabeth Merritt

Looking for content to listen to on the way to the Alliance annual meeting? Slate magazine recently launched a six episode podcast–“Stranger than Fiction.” Each week, Tim Wu, a Future Tense Fellow at the New American …
Futurist Friday: Robo-bees to the Rescue

By Elizabeth Merritt

This post from Scientific American paints a lovely picture of the future of disaster response. “Consider a rescue worker with a box full of 1,000 RoboBees—a package that would weigh less than a kilogram. The RoboBees could be …
Fuel Your Futurist Imagination: 6 Artistic Visions of the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

The BBC is running a contest, encouraging people to enter stills or video/animation depicting their personal visions of the future. They kicked off the “What If?” project by inviting six artists from around the world to seed …