• Reports of Losing Your Museum Job to a Robot have been Greatly Exaggerated.

    Forecasting is about exploring “fringe futures” as well as more probable outcomes. Part of the art of futures studies is casting your imagination out to the edges of the Cone ofPlausibility, but also knowing when to reel it back in. This …
  • Another Round of Technology and the Future of Education

    Today’s guest post comes from Phil Katz, the Alliance’s assistant director for research and co-conspirator on many CFM research projects. Tomorrow andBeyond There’s nothing new about the prediction that technology is going to remake …
  • CFM Returns to the Future with TrendsWatch 2013

    The Alliance has just released TrendsWatch 2013: Back to the Future, CFM’s second annual watch list of important emergent trends. If we’re right, and the trends we’ve tagged this year shape the evolution of museums, a museum visit in the …
  • Will You Lose Your Museum Job to a Robot?

    Drawing produced by participants in the  CFM “Drawing Club” event at the 2012 AAM conference OK, maybe not to a robot, but to increasingly sophisticated automation.  This question is prompted by a report released last month by …
  • The Future of Food

      I’m finishing my edits to a manuscript that grew out of CFM’s Feeding the Spirit Symposium in Pittsburgh last year. The discussion guide we assembled for the subsequent webcast is morphing into an e-book as well as a traditional print …
  • Coming Soon to Your Museum–The Internet of Cars

    I can hardly wait for the “Internet of Cars” to become something we simply take for granted. This includes cars that drive themselves  (now legal in Californiaand licensed in Nevada), but also cars that: Find their own parking places And …
  • Reaching Behind the Glass

    I’ve long admired the creativity and ingenuity of the Manchester Museum—following their exploits from inviting a hermit to live in the museum for forty days and forty nights and while engaging the public in an examination of what …
  • Printing the Future

    When I read that MakerBot was opening its first retail outlet, located in NYC, I sent a tweet-out looking for a volunteer to be CFM’s futurist-on-the-street. That is how I connected with Blaire Moskowitz, Business Development and Marketing …
  • You Might Like….

    One of my recent music discoveries is Stereo MCs—an English hip/hop electronica dance group which didn’t even form until I was three years out of college and well past the usual age at which one imprints on music. Stereo MCs might seem an …
  • One From Each Category: Part 1

    Sometimes I find myself fixating on one category of change, usually technology, since it gets so much coverage in the press. Who can resist news about robots and 3-D printing? (Or 3-D printing that kind of turns a little girl into a …

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