Scenarios – Page 5 – American Alliance of Museums

Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics

By Elizabeth Merritt

It’s a beautiful spring morning in 2036. Sitting down to breakfast, you gesture at your interactive e-tabletop, bringing up your international museum newsfeed. The lead headline grabs your attention, but you have trouble focusing on the …
Free Webinar on Forecasting the Future of Vulnerable Populations

By Elizabeth Merritt

I blogged a couple of months ago about a wonderful set of scenarios commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the future of vulnerable populations. Now the RWJ is offering a free webinar to enable readers to explore these …
Straight Up or with a Twist: Two Examples of how to Envision the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

The biggest challenge in preparing for the future is imagining what it will be like. One of the most important roles of futures studies is to help people write stories of the future that, like all good fiction, tell the truth about …
An Alternate Future for Museums: Part II

By Elizabeth Merritt

Global brand strategist Jonathan Salem Baskin contributes part two in his series of visions about the future of museums. You can read part one here. Museums in 2020: When Communities Got Real The siren call of Facebook and other social …
The Pinky Show Cats’ Report on the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

“We, three cats from the Pinky Show, went to the future. We brought back notes & stuff.” Read the report . Those of you who attended the AAM annual meeting this spring may have stumbled upon a curious exhibit in MuseumExpo—a set of …
Museum Design 2034: Perpetual Beta

By Elizabeth Merritt

I blogged last week about how futurists write stories of the future based on trends we can observe now. This helps people explore what their lives, and their organizations, might look like in these potential futures, which in turn helps …
Museum Design 2034: The Distributed Museum

By Elizabeth Merritt

Museum practitioners are pre-adapted to be futurists. Why? Because futurism is, basically, the process of telling compelling stories about things that haven’t happened yet. These stories help people explore what alternate futures …
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 …
Building a Self-Study Course in Futurism

By Elizabeth Merritt

One of CFM’s major goals is to encourage museum practitioners to think and plan for a longer time frame (longer, that is, than the usual one to three-year plan.) In our rapidly changing, uber-connected world a plan that looks good in the …
Questioning Assumptions: the Future of Education

By Elizabeth Merritt

The recent CFM posts about museum studies (here and here) have spun off in all sorts of interesting directions, including discussions at New Curator and MJ Writes. People propose that graduate programs should guarantee jobs for graduates, …