Join the FutureMuseum Project and add your voice to the future of museums

Museum workers based in 18 countries — including Nigeria, Guinea, Botswana, South Africa, Argentina, Colombia, Singapore, New Zealand, Denmark, and Norway — have already contributed their ideas to this ongoing free-to-access project.

Add your voice to the future of museums by emailing around 500 words to info@museum-id.com

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A FRAMEWORK FOR CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Eli Kuslansky, Principal and Chief Strategist, Unified Field

During these challenging times, the pandemic has created significant breakdowns as well as breakthroughs in how museums operate, the audience they serve, and what they provide. As the universe is always seeking balance, big breakdowns lead to big breakthroughs. Here’s the proof:

Between 1347-1350, as the Bubonic Plague swept across Europe, the influence of the Catholic Church diminished, allowing secularism and individualism to rise unleashing the forces in Italian society that made the Renaissance possible. Now we are at a point where bold ideas and original thinking is what we need to make the most out of this moment for the future.

The museums getting the most value from breakthroughs are the ones willing to ride the currents of change and institute bold ideas to shift museums as we know them. In a rapidly changing world, the biggest risk is not taking one. Museums that are taking risks are visitor centric, have participatory experiences, smart technology, a new generation of leaders, and are relevant and inclusive. As they ride the currents of change, they still are retaining their power of legitimacy as repositories of culture.

“A 21st century museum will be flexible and responsive, connected via multi-platform networks to a broader range of audiences. They will have shared industry resources like living labs, content repositories, smart technology, and can rapidly develop new exhibits and programs. This is a museum designed to reinvent the future”

Museums are utilizing advances in computing power and fast network speeds, digital media and fabrication, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) for membership services, immersive environments, and multichannel experiences. They are also looking at their role in the smart city. In tandem, there is a return to authenticity — things with real meaning that are creating opportunities for museums to connect contemporary audiences to their troves of unique objects. These changes are significant.

Consider that in 2019/2020 there were 850,000,000 unique visits to cultural institutions in the USA alone, Mike Winkelmann NFT artwork sold for (£ 51,115,545 ($69,000,000) at a Christies, the admissions income of the British Museum was 4.3 million British pounds ($5,801,130), while the Immersive Van Gogh experience generated £166,040,000 ($224,000,000) in revenues.

Against this backdrop, the future museum could be a networked, inclusive, co-curated and participatory community resource that is dynamically connected to and of the city in which it is in. These museums will make greater use of creative innovation like the Newseum’s New Inc lab, or the Interaction Lab at Cooper Hewitt. The museum of the future will create inventive new revenue sources such as licensing collections to immersive art shows and other venues, using NFTs (non-fungible tokens) for selling “merchandise”, to accompany exhibitions, for limited digital editions, tickets, and to replace physical membership cards.

A 21st century museum of the future will be flexible and responsive, connected via multi-platform networks to a broader range of audiences, have traditional and non-traditional partners and collaborators, and live and stored content feeds. They will have shared industry resources like living labs, content repositories, smart technology, and can rapidly develop new exhibits and programs. This is a museum designed to reinvent the future.

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THE CAMPAIGNING MUSEUM
Katy Ashton, Director, People’s History Museum

The future for museums will be built upon the foundations of those that came before us – those that campaigned for change and pushed boundaries – those that challenged the status quo and weren’t afraid to be bold. These people might not have worked in our sector – but their ideas, stories and actions can definitely be found in our collections and archives, and we should be shouting about them.

Museums for me have always been places of social change and justice where lives really are transformed by the experiences people have in our spaces, with our staff and volunteers, with our collections and with each other. Building a career in learning and engagement demonstrated clearly to me how our museums are brought to life by people – people interacting with collections, spaces, ideas and each other.

“In this moment, and as we reflect on what we have experienced and learnt from the pandemic, we need to be confident, passionate and bold about our role and our impact”

Museums in the future will embrace and celebrate and embody this power – they will be proud of how they can shine a light on issues, ideas, cultures, identities, and subjects that are often hidden or unheard or avoided.

We are currently surrounded by division, conflict, inequality and contested histories, and grappling as a sector, and as individual organisations, with what our future role should be and how we can make a real difference. In this moment, and as we reflect on what we have experienced and learnt from the pandemic, we need to be confident, passionate and bold about our role and our impact.

For me our role is to use our assets, skills and expertise to amplify the issues and campaigns that are still so important locally, nationally and internationally. Campaigning and change are inextricably linked; it is campaigners who have paved the way to achieve so many changes that have helped to shape a better world. We see this in our collections from the past and we are seeing it before our very eyes with campaigns focused on equality and the environment today (which then themselves become part of our collections).

Museums can be amazing allies and collaborators with those who are still campaigning for change if we bring together our collections, our people, our partners and our audiences in meaningful and exciting ways…

– Our collections can provoke strong emotions and be springboards for starting difficult conversations
– Our spaces can bring people together and open up discussion and debate
– Our passions and expertise can connect us with unusual partners in unusual ways
– Our programmes can provide platforms for people to share their lived experience

In the future we need to know when to step up and inspire action – and when to step back and give space to the voices of those who aren’t always heard. We have the ability to make a real difference through our work as campaigning museums if we are brave and bold in how we put our spaces, people and collections to use.

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DECOLONIZING THE MUSEUM IN AFRICA
Boubacar Diallo, Head of Collection and Inventory Department, National Museum of Guinea

What is the future of the museum in Africa? Knowing where we come from allows us to project ourselves into the future. In 1992, the former Malian President Alpha Oumar Konaré, then president of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), said that: “[…], we must kill, I say kill, the Western model of museums in Africa […] ”. Since this famous speech by President Alpha Oumar Konaré, many museum initiatives have been implemented. I especially want to mention the MSD program (Museums at the Service of Development) designed and implemented by the African heritage school EPA based in Benin.

I took this example because it is one of the programmes that has enabled several museums in French-speaking African countries to renew their permanent exhibitions, including the National Museum of Guinea where I work, and to connect them with the public, schoolchildren, and young people in the hope of seeing them return and become loyal visitors. Did it pay off? This question remains because museums still do not attract and interest many of the communities concerned.

“The future African museum will be connected with local communities through participatory and collaborative projects… a place of consultation, cooperation, innovation and interaction”

Today, African museum professionals still have questions about an African model of museums. What often comes up is to decolonize our museums — that the future African museum will be a decolonized museum. But what is a decolonized museum in Africa?

Recently, thanks to the MuseumsFutures Africa project designed and implemented by the Goethe-Institut in six museums on the continent, including our own, we are on the way to finding answers to this question. The reflections that we lead, based on our own local realities, lead us to see that the future African museum will be a museum connected with local communities through participatory and collaborative projects. The future museum will be a place of consultation, cooperation, innovation and interaction with all majority and minority elements of the community.

The future museum will be a place where we not only jointly develop projects for the collection, acquisition works of art, preserve works of art, value intangible heritage, but also co-design and set-up exhibitions.

I would like to add that our future museum will be hyper connected. It will use new technologies to interact with audiences who are becoming more and more virtual, in particular young people. It will be a virtual place of consultation for innovation and positive change, of information exchange and discussion between professionals and local communities, and of awareness of the evils and defects that beset our societies of today and tomorrow. It will be a platform for exchanges and debates on the future challenges of the African continent and of the constantly changing world.

Our future museum will be built on the basis of diversity, consultation, and the defence of the rights and interests of all parts of local society.

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GETTING FUTURE READY TODAY
Alvin Tan, Deputy Chief Executive (Policy & Community), National Heritage Board of Singapore

Museums in the past have traditionally been focused on studying, conserving, and showcasing their collections. While these roles continue to be fundamental, museums are now expected to take on expanded and evolving roles as community hubs and precinct rejuvenators as they transition towards becoming museums of the future.

The Indian Heritage Centre of Singapore is one of three heritage institutions established using a participatory approach which positions the centre as a shared community space right from the start. It is co-managed and co-funded by the government and the community, and the storyline for its permanent galleries was developed in consultation with 56 Indian organisations. Since its establishment, the centre has been presenting community co-curated exhibitions where communities contribute content, objects and programmes. In 2017, it launched Community Expressions where various Indian sub-communities would stage a “take-over” of the centre during a weekend and offer free programming such as workshops, talks, craft activities etc.

This approach has reduced the centre’s operating costs, increased the size of its volunteer pool, and contributed to a more varied and inclusive programming calendar.It has also strengthened connections between the centre and the sub-communities (or source communities) and instilled a sense of pride and ownership for the centre.

“Besides functioning as community hubs and precinct rejuvenators, museums should leverage on technology to create immersive experiences and increase access by bringing their collections and programmes beyond the museum walls”

To complement their roles as community hubs, museums of the present could further future-proof themselves by entrenching themselves as the cultural anchor of the precinct in which they are based, and partnering key stakeholders to co-present or co-fund programmes, enliven the precinct, and attract higher footfall. Located in Little India, the Indian Heritage Centre has always regarded the precinct as an extension of its programming space and precinct stakeholders as programming partners. It collaborates with these stakeholders to co-organize precinct-wide arts, culture and heritage festivals such as the annual CultureFest and other festive celebrations.

To bring its programming beyond museum walls and out onto the surrounding streets, the Centre also engages arts and cultural groups to stage regular outdoor performances known as Neighbourhood Sketches, and conducts guided tours to encourage visitors to explore the precinct.

Besides functioning as community hubs and precinct rejuvenators, museums of the present should leverage on technology to create immersive experiences and increase access by bringing their collections and programmes beyond museum walls and even beyond precinct boundaries. In this regard, the Centre has been adopting new technologies to cater to the audiences of today while preparing for the audiences of tomorrow. Within its galleries, the centre offers augmented reality applications and uses non-touch motion-based technology to create interactive visitor experiences. It has created virtual exhibitions, digital tours and online educational resources to reach out to existing and new audiences through its website and social media platforms, and it has even deployed a mobile telepresence robot to bring the museum experience to persons with disabilities or mobility issues.

As a result of its embrace of technology, the Indian Heritage Centre was able to stay relevant and remain connected with its stakeholders and the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through its digital and “phygital” offerings, the centre was also able to uplift spirits, and more importantly, to take bold and continuous steps towards becoming a pandemic resilient museum of the future.

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FUTURE MUSEUMS AS KEY ACTORS IN PUBLIC POLICY
Goabaone Montsho, Anthropologist, Botswana National Museum

In the future museums will largely be concerned with the pursuit of socio-cultural developmental programs and confronting the policy issues which plague their communities. They will assume the role of pioneering social development. Museums as social institutions, especially in the developing world, are serving communities riddled by social issues ranging from poverty, unemployment, income inequalities, poor governance and political instabilities, marginalization, diseases etc. Due to scarcity of resources funds are channelled towards institutions, which are good at ameliorating the aftermath of socioeconomic issues. Subsequently, the future museum cannot afford to look to the north or the south but rather develop timely social programs geared towards addressing their respective community issues. By so doing museums will be equally valued for charting the course for the future as well as preserving memories of the past societies.

“The future museum will strive to foster transparency, reconciliation and trust amongst local and international communities, particularly on issues of cultural migrations and restitution”

The future museum should be capable of utilizing its repository of knowledge to link its communities with new heights of social development. For instance, indigenous communities have rich systems and methods of cooperation and wealth generation, which used to be effective in poverty alleviation in the past. Museums as custodians of intangible heritage should preserve and share these methods with policy makers. This intangible heritage could then be modified to formulate public policies which are aligned with cultural practices of indigenous communities to attain policy success. Thus, the future museum will be one of the key social actors in public policy formulation and implementation. It should also be the museum that cautions and encourages governments about the rights of indigenous communities and how they should be taken on board when formulating laws that govern the management of their heritage and to also involve them in the general management.

The future museum will assume the role of an intermediary between local communities, the state and the international community. Museums will no longer be perceived as instruments of the state or as ordinary non-profit organizations. These social institutions will be indispensable in fostering effective service delivery. This is due to the fact that museums will be community oriented in practice. Through their capacity to network museums will be in a position to translate the grim realities of their communities in to international platforms. Through liaising with international organizations the future museum will bridge the gap between the local and the international and will be a platform for the discussion of social issues. It will strive to foster transparency, reconciliation and trust amongst local and international communities, particularly on issues of cultural migrations and restitution.

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DEMOCRATISING MUSEUMS
Adriana Hetch de Mello, Gisella Gomez, Walter Olmos, Julieta Puszkiel, Romina Ramos, Raúl Facundo Rojas Romero, Raúl Facundo, Debora Pittito, Museum Studies students, Instituto de Formación Docente y Técnica 8 (ISFDyT 8) La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We would like to think that in the future, the social value of museums will increase, not because they will have more prestige but rather because they will meaningfully and truly include, integrate and unite communities, who will find themselves reflected, identified and considered as a vital part of the experience itself.

Museums will not wait for visitors to be interested in their displays and exhibitions. They will actively take the museum to the possible visitor, they will be interconnected with other institutions such as schools, hospitals, old people’s homes and the like, providing talks and taking the objects to the ‘visitors’. Apart from advertising museums, the idea will be to leave the audience with something to solve, to find, to discover if they approach the museum. There will also be ‘caravan museums’ which will reach those groups who are far away from museums either physically or academically speaking. These will entail interdisciplinary groups of professionals who will engage the young and the old with stories, displays and a small ‘visitable’ replica of the museum inside the van.

“If we manage to take into the museums those who for one reason or other have never thought of coming, those who have felt excluded for not being able to experience exhibitions the way they could experience the world, those who have been forgotten for so long, we will ensure an inclusive new museum, one of which we can all feel part”

The internal organization of the buildings will also be different. Many open corridors will beckon visitors, who will be able to create their own tours, in line with choosing their own adventure stories. Guests will move around freely, experiencing a more hands-on visit. Exhibitions will be designed taking into account the disabled, the blind, the deaf, making sure everyone gets the most of their time there.

Also, the future museums will be engaged with caring the environment. They will have environmentally friendly technology to generate renewable energy and will promote responsible consumption. Different communities can participate by teaching others what they do to preserve the environment. Last but not least, museums will integrate explanations, signs, leaflets and guides in minority and aboriginal languages such as Quechua or Guaraní, languages which have long been disregarded and left behind but have managed to survive in our region and represent our origins and roots.

If we manage to take into the museums those who for one reason or other have never thought of coming, those who have felt excluded for not being able to experience exhibitions the way they could experience the world, those who have been forgotten for so long, we will ensure an inclusive new museum, one of which we can all feel part.

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SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS RESTRAINING THE IMPACT OF MUSEUMS
Laura Wilkinson, Programme Director, New Museum, Museum of London

The Future Museum is a deconstructed form of its current self; it is more adaptable, creative and confident, enabling it to survive and thrive in times of change. Whilst museums as institutions have stayed static, the world around us has radically shifted. We are living in times of accelerated change. Growing social inequality, major environmental issues and the digital revolution are all affecting the role of museums as part of the cultural fabric of our society.

Systemic problems are restraining the impact of museums. The monoculture that pervades most senior management teams remains a significant issue. Decades of attempting and failing to tackle the lack of diversity means we need to change tack. The speed of technological change is transforming the way people access, enjoy and create culture and if we don’t seek to fully grasp its potential there is a real risk that we become obsolete for those we seek to engage.

It’s not to say there hasn’t been any progress. We’ve seen pockets of innovation; new partnership models have been formed, there have been attempts at rebalancing power through methodologies such as co-production, and years of austerity have forced round after round of restructures – but fundamentally the museum as an institution remains the same.

How do we do change? By a wholesale review of the system. We need to look at more than the organisational chart when we talk about change; we need to challenge the formal structures and processes; and informal norms and behaviours that shape the way we work.

By working with people not like us. Partnership and collaboration will be core business – not just something for one or two departments to lead on. Teams will be formed with more than just ‘museum’ people. We will naturally draw in talent from across the creative industries and the social sector to create museum experiences that deliver the change we hope to see.

“We are living in times of accelerated change. Growing social inequality, major environmental issues and the digital revolution are all affecting the role of museums as part of the cultural fabric of our society”

By challenging our hierarchical models of decision making. A more participatory model will tackle the impenetrable old-fashioned silos – participation will extend within and outside the museum and we will explore more human-centred models of design.

By loosening up our structures and flexing the 9-5. An increasingly intergenerational workforce presents huge opportunities for the sector. We will widen the pool of people we employ by enabling those who aren’t able, or choose not to work a standard 5 day-week ensuring we can benefit from the lived experiences of the many, not the few.

By extending our horizons. We will commit time to exploring our collections and programme through futures thinking to ensure we are relevant for the audiences of tomorrow.

By letting go. The funding climate isn’t going to get any easier. In order to adapt we need to look critically at what we do and stop that which has least impact.

We can’t always predict the future but by rethinking the institution we can create the conditions for the Future Museum to thrive.

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MAKING CONNECTIONS
Oliver Vicars-Harris, Director, Connecting Culture

Having walked the line between museums and innovation for a quarter of a century, it seems clear to me that the sector is resistant to exponential change.

Traditional museums have played an important role in making connections between different objects across time and space. Increasingly, they have used the stories around these collections to create a connection with their different audiences.

Future museums will continue to build on this, adding multiple layers of meaning and placing greater emphasis on brokering different perspectives. They will capitalize on their position of trust to become authentic mediators between expert and popular opinion. Increasingly aware of their role in the issues of today, they will draw on their unique evidence base to provide context to current events. Valued both as a preserver of memory and instigator for ideas, they will empower people to seek answers and foster action.

“Increasingly aware of their role in the issues of today, they will draw on their unique evidence base to provide context to current events. Valued both as a preserver of memory and instigator for ideas, they will empower people to seek answers and foster action”

Museum curatorship will have evolved beyond preoccupation with preserving and presenting collections, to propensity for encouraging connections. A genuine two-way relationship will exist, with the audience given agency to drive the agenda. The distance between past and present will be reduced, with history providing meaning. The division between high and low art will be dissolved, with heritage providing contrast to popular culture.

Museum professionals will be less concerned with specialisation and more with making connections through collaboration across different skillsets. Silos will be dismantled in favour of multi-disciplinary teams working in an agile fashion towards a set of shared objectives informed by audience insight. Pet projects will be a thing of the past, with data used to demonstrate impact and inform a continuous cycle of development.

The physical/ digital museum divide will be dissolved, with a seamless relationship created between the two. Analogue interaction will be more important than ever and digital will become less of a distraction and more a ubiquitous layer delivered through a range of devices to complement the before>during>after real-world experience.

None of this sounds particularly radical but, when it comes to envisaging the museum of the future, it’s clear that evolution is more realistic than revolution.

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TECHNOLOGY WILL OFFER OPPORTUNITIES TO CAPTURE NEW AUDIENCES
Catherine Devine, Chief Digital Officer, American Museum of Natural History

Let’s look back thirty years as a way to appreciate the possibilities of the next thirty years. In 1990, technologies that we all take for granted today didn’t exist. Websites didn’t exist, Google didn’t exist, smartphones didn’t exist, personal computers barely existed. Today, we take these technologies for granted. They have fundamentally changed our lives, how we work and live and in turn how our audiences experience the Museum today and what they expect from a Museum.

“Technology will develop even more rapidly and whilst we may not be able to imagine the form it will take, that exponential growth and change is a certainty”

It’s much easier to look to the past and see change than to imagine change in the future. We see glimpses of the future today in artificial intelligence and machine learning, use of data, augmented and virtual reality but there will many others currently unimagined. Technology will develop even more rapidly and whilst we may not be able to imagine the form it will take, that exponential growth and change is a certainty.

Forrester analysts expect 10 times the change in the next 5 years than in the past 5. Glimpses are available in today’s emerging technologies, by imagining them in a much more mature state. Glimpses also exist in considering the barriers we take for granted today and imagining they don’t exist. Barriers of time, place, size and reality are a small insight into potential opportunities. To experience other times, places, add to or remove the real world and experience other scales such as life as an ant, or navigating the universe. These changes presents Museums with enormous opportunities to present in new ways and capture new audiences.

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RENEWED FOCUS ON SCHOOL PROGRAMMES VITAL FOR THE FUTURE
Amy McDowall, Primary Learning Coordinator, Manchester Museum

When I began working in museums 10 years ago, school programmes seemed top of our collective agendas. With sustained access to much-needed cash, museums were transforming their learning offers and vastly increasing their school visitor numbers. We innovated, we collaborated, and we had a shared vision. But recently, schools have barely featured in the sector’s big conference programmes. Yes, most museums now have established learning offers – often despite dramatic funding cuts – but have we really not changed our approach in a decade? And where are these programmes going next?

We must not take this audience for granted. Schools are the museum sector’s most diverse visitor group, and therefore one of our greatest assets. How we engage with children on educational visits really does matter, yet our best ideas and most inclusive practice rarely reach our day-to-day learning programmes. Does the average day-long school visitor get to co-produce an exhibition, pursue their personal interests, or engage in dialogue with curators? Do they debate, collaborate, create, or feel a sense of ownership of their local museum?

“Does the average day-long school visitor get to co-produce an exhibition, pursue their personal interests, or engage in dialogue with curators? Do they debate, collaborate, create, or feel a sense of ownership of their local museum?”

One barrier for us is, I imagine, the fear that that this type of visit wouldn’t fit with the curriculum-focussed demands of the customer here – namely, the teacher. But the wider education sector is now changing too. Heavily content-based curricula – much like the idea of ‘museums as knowledge-keepers’ – are looking increasingly archaic in the digital age.

Education in the future will be about what is done with all this knowledge … though the debates we’ll be having will be as old as humanity itself: How do we apply knowledge and technological advances to improve our world? How do we understand cultural difference? What makes a good life, or a just society? What is ‘truth’?

We know that museums are ideal places to have these conversations. With our skills and expertise in facilitating these conversations with other groups, we should now be supporting the mainstream education sector to have them with us too.

If we succeed, we will reap the rewards of a more diverse future audience; one that has grown up owning its museums, who will see museums as vital in shaping and enabling the crucial debates of their lives, and who will fight for museums in an uncertain future.

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EXPERIENCE-DRIVEN AND PEOPLE-CENTERED
Dana Mitroff Silvers, Founder + Director, Designing Insights / Editor, Design Thinking for Museums

The museum of the future will be more visitor- and guest-centered than ever before in the history of museums and cultural institutions. Human-centered processes such as Design Thinking and Service Design will become critical, foundational skills for emerging museum professionals, and museum staff will need to be fluent in people-centered, qualitative methods and practices in order to bring nuance and insights to the “big data” at their fingertips and better serve their audiences.

“Museums that cling to traditional, authoritative models will lose audiences on a dramatic scale to new types of experience-driven, guest-centered organizations that we can’t even imagine today”

This transformation in the traditional museum model has been emerging over the past two decades, but will become the norm and not the exception in the future. As stated in the most recent Culture Track report published by LaPlaca Cohen, “With loyalty now rooted in trust, consistency, and kindness, empathic, service-focused relationships will replace existing transactional models.”

This notion of empathic, service-focused relationships is nothing new in for-profit organizations, and museums of the future will embrace this holistic and human-centered approach as well. The museums that cling to traditional, authoritative models and artifact-driven approaches will lose audiences on a dramatic scale to new types of experience-driven, guest-centered organizations that we can’t even imagine today.

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RECOVERING OUR HUMAN SENSIBILITIES
Diana Chen, Lecturer at MoMA, New York /  Independent Art Advisor

The goal of museum education in the future will be to curate experiences that reconnect visitors to their shared humanity. Museum education will be less about worshiping masterpieces, but more about enriching personal experience.

Museum technology will not be the ultimate goal for museums, but will instead act as a vehicle to help generate a deeper understanding for a cross section of visitors. Depth of understanding comes from taking time and looking at original pieces of art.

“The goal of museum education in the future will be to curate experiences that reconnect visitors to their shared humanity”

By focusing too much on digital experience, we disconnect from our human senses—smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch—and, in the process, lose our artistic sensibility. A museum should be a place to help us be conscious of the things that make us human. Ideally, the future museum will be a place for us to redevelop our sensibilities.

Ideas and intelligence might be the most valuable products in our time, and they will remain relevant even while careers change. Instead of striving to compensate for the knowledge that schools fail to teach, the museums of the future will offer a place where innovative ideas can be heard and discussed. When these ideas change our behavior, they can change the world.

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A MATURING OF IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES
Jenny Kidd, Senior Lecturer, Cardiff University / Co-Director, Digital Media & Society Research Group

We have seen increasing use of the term ‘immersive’ across the museums sector in recent years. The term is used (loosely) to describe encounters that are audience centred, arouse the senses, engage the emotions, and that are attuned to their environment. They have been referred to as opportunities to pursue a shift from storytelling to storyliving. Immersive practice is often – but not always – infused with the digital, although its digitality should not be understood as a defining feature. Immersive experiences are much broader than VR, AR or 3D sound (for example). Some are stubbornly analogue.

“Immersive media allow us to diversify the stories we tell, to layer meaning and to embrace ambiguity. They can work seamlessly at the interstices of the physical and digital, and offer experiences that move creatively between the individual and the collective”

We have now entered a more nuanced stage in the development of these kinds of experiences. And so it follows that there are emergent ethical and practical questions, consideration of which will occupy increasing resources (financial, cognitive, time). These include: What kinds of immersive experiences and storyworlds can be built in and around museums? How closely tethered do these have to be to the other stories that are being told on site (offline or online)? How should invitations to participate be framed? How can we meaningfully evaluate that quality of being immersed? And what can’t immersive experiences do?

Some critics are cynical, seeing the increased shift toward ‘the immersive’ as a form of aesthetic and emotional capitalism. It is perhaps true that museums understand immersive encounters as one way to better position themselves within the ‘experience economy’, where the competition is increasingly coming from escape rooms and street games.

As a scholar-practitioner who has been involved in the commission, curation and evaluation of a number of immersive experiences I recognise such critiques as important, but I see great potential here also. Immersive media allow us to diversify the stories we tell, to layer meaning and to embrace ambiguity. They can work seamlessly at the interstices of the physical and digital, and offer experiences that move creatively between the individual and the collective. They are performative, embodied, unruly and increasingly ambitious.

Going forward, we will see museums’ immersive projects more forcefully connecting and contributing to social movements for peace, equality and justice, environmental activism, and the radical overhaul of representations.

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MUSEUMS MUST TAKE THE ETHICAL PATH
Bridget McKenzie, Director, Flow Associates

When predicting the future of museums, it’s vital to consider where we are referring to. As Tom Atlee has written “things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster, simultaneously”. The better and the worse are not evenly distributed. Parts of the world are being destroyed by climate change, industrial ecocide and wars over resources, and are en route, faster and faster, to even worse. The role of museums for those places, such that they will exist, will be extreme conservation and salvage. That might mean locking up against looters, rather than opening up as places of sanctuary. It might mean moving collections into safer countries and using digital tools to maintain connections with communities of those places.

“If museums want to continue to exist, by being relevant, they will take the ethical path. They will proactively work with communities to shift towards more regenerative and circular economies. They will explore ethical and participatory forms of entrepreneurship. They will provide safe, inclusive spaces for envisaging possible futures”

The countries for whom things have been getting better, due to technology and benefiting from the industrial ecocide we choose not to see, will also become more unequal than many of them already are. Their communities, divided between haves and have-nots, will divide again between those who recognise their duties to regenerate the planet and repair injustices, and those who turn on each other and seek power.

If museums want to continue to exist, by being relevant, they will take the ethical path. They will proactively work with communities to shift towards more regenerative and circular economies. They will explore ethical and participatory forms of entrepreneurship in order to sustain themselves when or where public funding dries up. They will provide safe, inclusive spaces for envisaging possible futures, for learning from past and indigenous cultures and from the capacities of nature, and for helping communities take action for eco-social justice. They will look to the unliveable places and see people and non-human species exiled from, or still suffering, there as part of their community, our shared world.

Conserving heritage will be recognised as the core purpose of museums, but this will not contradict a greater emphasis on inclusive public education. Conservation and public service will be seen as one and the same thing. With this integral sense of purpose, their structures will become more sociocratic and less hierarchical.

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FROM VOICE OF AUTHORITY TO GENUINE CONVERSATION
Elizabeth Cotton, Head of Human History, Auckland War Memorial Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira, New Zealand

The future of museums is one where the old paradigm of a collections-focussed approach versus an audience-centric approach are no longer the only two spheres we think in and they are no longer put up against each other as an either/or argument. For museums in post-colonial countries, the primacy of the object in engaging with indigenous communities will be the driver and not the afterthought. Shifting visitor experience from the museum’s self-proclaimed voice of authority to genuine conversation utilising the agency of collections to empower, engage, to uncover layers of meaning is the future. This will require an opening of the doors, an understanding that there are multiple view points and that museums are the sharers of collections and the gatherer of different knowledge systems relating to multiple audiences.

“Shifting visitor experience from the museum’s self-proclaimed voice of authority to genuine conversation utilising the agency of collections to empower, engage, to uncover layers of meaning is the future”

Co-development will be the norm rather than the exception, acknowledging the importance of engaging communities from the outset in the development of programmes, exhibitions, collection development and collection care. This is a next step from consultation, it is a meaningful process where the outcome has not been already defined by the institution and presented to the community for input, but one where the outcome and the process is open at the outset to the influence of the communities whose cultural heritage is held in safe keeping by the museum on their behalf. A true bi-cultural approach is one based on genuine partnership, and is at the heart of co-development.

Taking the collections to audiences, whether digitally or physically is part of this conversation, as are considerations such as the importance of communities being able to engage without barriers, to touch, to celebrate and to perform alongside collections. A global view, moving away from “museum best practice” to community best practice is required.

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MUSEUMS AS AGENTS OF CHANGE
Mike Murawski, Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum

Museums everywhere have the potential to serve as agents of social change – bringing people together, contributing to local communities, and changing people’s lives. Given our current moment of political polarization, highly-contested social debates, and widespread global efforts to confront oppression, now is the time to challenge the entrenched traditional notions of museums and proactively shape a new future. Now is the time to transform the roles that museums serve within our communities, envisioning them as living institutions and active spaces for connection and coming together, for dialogue and difficult conversations, and for listening and sharing. Museums have the potential to amplify marginalized voices and celebrate unheard stories. They can be spaces for acknowledging and reflecting on difference, and for bridging divides. They can be spaces for justice, growth, struggle, love, and hope.

“Now is the time to transform the roles that museums serve within our communities, envisioning them as living institutions and active spaces for connection and coming together, for dialogue and difficult conversations, and for listening and sharing”

It is the vital task of museum professionals – as well as museum visitors, civic leaders, community organizers, and the broader public – to radically expand the work of museums as agents of change and more fiercely recognize the work that museums are doing to enact change around the relevant issues in our communities. These conversations and actions cannot take place solely behind museum walls or in the isolation of professional conferences. We need to publicly work together to realize this change. This work involves an enormous amount of listening, developing trust, and building relationships – both within our museums as well as with our audiences and communities. It involves shaping and productively debating a set of core values that reflect a commitment to accessibility, inclusion, justice, and human rights. It involves growing a community of change and advocacy from within, and envisioning the work of our museums as human-centered. The future of museums is being shaped by the work we are doing right now to take action toward positive social change and bring people together into a more just, equitable, compassionate, and connected society.

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THE 21ST CENTURY MUSEUM: A THINK-TANK FOR COMMUNITY
Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell, Curator and Museum Education Specialist, Washington, D.C.

The future of museums lies in reconsidering their role in 21st Century society. Already so early in the Century several trends have emerged which define the zeitgeist, namely: climate change and social cohesion – or in a single word: justice. Concerns for environmental and social justice alike have seen mass marches populated by hundreds of thousands of people held simultaneously worldwide. Thanks to the digital boom, it is now easier than ever before to inform, empower, and mobilize large populations against injustice. With so many global welfare concerns from human trafficking to environmental wellness, to which there are such polarizing governance, the social justice revolution doesn’t seem to be waning any time soon. And therein lies the true future of museums: timeliness.

Due to a convergence of factors: digital immediacy, globalization, 24-hour news reels, and instant connectivity via social media, the world runs on the instantly-updated now. In such a world, where people are ever-increasingly engaged with art, culture, science, and innovation of the immediate, museums must adapt in order to effectively and appropriately serve their audiences. Museums must also reconsider their defining role in society.

“As visitors express a growing concern for social justice, museums must become places to empower ideas and strategies towards change”

Historically, museums have functioned as temples of wisdom through the preservation of artifacts. In the Digital Age museums had to adapt to serve an increasingly technologically-connected audience. Today, museums must once again redefine their meaning. Conceptually, museums are centers of ideas, specifically centers of the discovery, empowerment, and nurture of ideas. Through curatorial-led historical interpretation, scientific education, and artistic expression, museums have always exemplified this role. However, as museums become evermore participatory, it is urgent that the position of the visitor is also to be discovered, empowered, and nurtured.

As visitors, through social media and other forms of engagement with the museum, express a growing concern for social justice, museums must become places to empower ideas and strategies towards change. Simply put, museums must embrace their roles as think-tanks. In truth, museums have always operated as such, just not explicitly. In an effort to embrace timeliness, and the ever elusive truth, museums must overtly accept this role. The 21st Century museum will come to be defined by its timeliness in response to social justice issues, its role in social justice issues within its community, and its position as a place where ideas are catalyzed. As think-tanks, the future of museums is future itself.

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TALKING TO STRANGERS AND CHALLENGING THE SOCIAL MEDIA ECHO CHAMBER
Rosie Stanbury, Head of Live Programmes, Wellcome Collection, London

Most of us have a natural desire to meet with like-minded people. It’s one of the reasons that lots of us work in museums, because of a shared fascination in objects, people and history. These days, we can tune-in to the things we like, and switch-off from the things we don’t more than ever before. The danger of this seductive state has revealed itself acutely this year. In the wake of Brexit and Trump we need to challenge the social media echo chamber we find ourselves in.

“We urgently need to create lots of opportunities for people from different walks of life to talk about the big stuff: Human endeavour, discovery, nature, history and the future”

We urgently need to create lots of opportunities for people from different walks of life to talk about the big stuff: Human endeavour, discovery, nature, history and the future. Museums offer the perfect space. Objects can provide provocations and can act as social levellers. Of course, there is a danger that museums are echo chambers for their own ideas and their own audiences. We need to open ourselves up to new perspectives and possibilities. As the people that run the spaces, we can seed ideas, invite in new groups with different agendas and provoke new conversations.

But these conversations need careful support and direction to grow. Skills in facilitation and education need to be nurtured and developed. We need to learn from other sectors that are developing innovative engagement techniques, from performance and education to social justice and training.

Over the last year we’ve invited our audience to propose their own ideas for events in Wellcome Collection through Open Platform. This is an invitation to create small-scale pop-up events in our Reading Room. We offer expenses and facilitation training for those that would like it. The emphasis is on participation, and we don’t advertise the events beyond our building, so the audience for the event stumbles across the activities in the building on the day. People sometimes pop in for a cup of coffee, then end up taking part in an event that lasts an hour. Events have explored a vast range of subjects from intersex and death to monkey poo and cancer.

It’s been a joy to watch the programme evolve and I’m excited to see even more strangers making connections and challenging one another in the future.

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INCREASING DIVERSITY AND HELPING TO ESTABLISH A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP
Péjú Oshin, curator, writer and educator

As we look towards the future museums will continue to provide an important place for discussion and the exchange of ideas. But the conversations museums spark in the future will be greatly improved by increasing diversity – not just of the audience but crucially the museum staff too. Doing so will add to the rich cultural fabric museums preserve and display.

Currently many museums struggle to actively engage and develop long-term relationships with audiences from BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) or lower socio-economic backgrounds. This is a problem. Museums need to be representative of the communities they live in – both in terms of the stories they tell and the objects they collect.

“Helping to establish a sense of ownership – both of the museum environment and the collections – is crucial”

Museums of the future will understand that engaging such groups requires simple questions rather than over-engineered thinking. Museums need to regularly ask BAME audiences “What would you like to see?” or “What are your interests?” in order to build rapid response practices.

Asking questions and responding rapidly will help open up museums to these new and diverse audiences and will make them feel valued. It will attract additional visitors.

Helping to establish a sense of ownership – both of the museum environment and the collections – is crucial. Museums need to take regular action to collaborate with new and diverse audiences to ensure collections connect with the everyday person who doesn’t yet know they have the museum bug.

Museums have nothing to fear from this process. Rapid response practices simply serve as a tool to bridge the gap between the occasionally un-relatable and the familiar yet significant daily elements of our lives.

To ensure museums stay open and have a bright future, we must be willing to adapt and extend our understanding of our collections and exhibitions to help attract a variety of audiences – in doing so we will keep stories and ideas fresh and relatable.

Péjú Oshin is a British-Nigerian curator, writer and educator based in London. Her work explores liminality in culture, identity and the built environment through working with artists, archives and cultural artefacts to create and further explore shared experiences across a global African diaspora https://www.pejuoshin.com/

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NOT JUST A BUILDING, BUT BUILDING COMMUNITY
Amy Schaffman, Education Manager, Augusta Museum of History

Museums occupy a unique place in society. Museums offer tangible rewards, but are often misunderstood and undervalued. After all, cultural and heritage organizations cannot cure diseases, end wars, or protect their communities from impending attacks. They are often seen as exclusive places, catering to only certain segments of society. However, I would argue that this is a mischaracterization and that museums are, and will remain, important for a healthy society.

“Museums may not directly resolve the many issues plaguing humanity in the 21st century but, by providing creative and intellectual opportunities, they can play a part in the ultimate solutions”

Generally speaking, museums can be catalysts for positive changes within a community. At the Augusta Museum of History, we are dedicated to preserving, protecting, and communicating the history of the region surrounding the Savannah River. The Augusta area has been the epicenter of revolutionary battles, industrialization, and civil rights struggles. The Museum staff is committed to maintaining and expanding relationships and partnerships with the community to accomplish this mission. As an educator, I actively participate in this process by meeting with local community educators and groups and listening to their wants and needs.

Educational outreach must be a part of the future of an effective museum. The museum should become a resource for the community it serves, both inside and outside the physical building space. Part of the future of museums will involve technology: providing people the ability to examine, explore and participate using their smart devices.

Additionally, using exhibit spaces for innovative programs, such as interactive escape rooms, promotes ongoing visitor interest. The museum auditorium thus becomes a forum for the public to consider the history of its community. Schools and teachers will use the museum’s vast archives to expand the student experience and make connections to history taught in the classroom. Those with mental and physical challenges will also be able to find enrichment in the museum.

Museums must become an extension of their outside communities. Museums may not directly resolve the many issues plaguing humanity in the 21st century but, by providing creative and intellectual opportunities, they can play a part in the ultimate solutions.

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PUBLIC RESEARCH AND ENQUIRY
Ken Arnold, Creative Director, Medical Museion and Professor at Copenhagen University

Should museums of the future prioritise collections or audiences? The problem with this well-worn debate is that it risks overshadowing a third essential aspect of their mission: namely research.

I have recently taken up the directorship of the small but vibrant Medical Museion in Copenhagen, where research is at the heart of much of what goes on. Not just focussed on its collections, the investigators it hosts also pursue interests in such diverse topics as the smell of hospitals, healthy aging and the connections between mind and gut. Collectively, they have fashioned a distinctive form of museum enquiry, one that is methodologically promiscuous, frequently multi-disciplinary and often focussed on topics that have a broad resonance: research that makes sense in public.

“The most important museums of the next half century will be those that frame their mission around a spirit of enquiry, and whose public programmes effectively turn both curators and visitors into investigators”

It is part of a university, and that no doubt helps explain its thriving inquisitive habits. But there is also something rather Danish about this too. For since at least 1958 their national Museum Act has stipulated that those supported by the government should undertake research as one of their five ‘pillars’. It is simply taken for granted then that museums are, in part, institutions whose purpose is to find things out.

So here’s my prediction, or maybe more accurately my prescriptive speculation: the most important museums of the next half century will be those that frame their mission around a spirit of enquiry, and whose public programmes effectively turn both curators and visitors into investigators of sorts. What’s more, focusing on the role of museums in ‘public research’ offers those of us with professional interests in helping shape their future a chance to get beyond the bi-focal myopia of endlessly trying to decide whether collections or audiences should come first.

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COLLABORATION AND WELL-BEING
Nadine Loach, Assistant Registrar, Leeds Museums and Galleries

In the future, museums will be built on collaborations. Collaborations between staff, museums, universities, libraries, government bodies, visitors, sponsors, donors and communities. All working to make museums more sustainable at their core.

An organisation’s culture is its identity. Strong organisational health, culture and leadership will be recognised as contributing significantly to the development of more resilient museums. Museums will be more in tune with how they function effectively; their structure, collaborations, finances, and overall shared ‘purpose’.

“Strong organisational health, culture and leadership will be recognised as contributing significantly to the development of more resilient museums”

A synergy of organisational, personal and professional development is necessary for the effective delivery of museums’ strategies. This will be understood at every level of development from sole museum professionals to government-funded institutions and independent museums trusts. The delivery of these forms of development will be through a combined approach of talks, workshops, partner collaborations, networks, training, resources, conferences, and improved staff communication and social activities.

Future museums will ensure the wellbeing of staff and encourage their professional development. This focus on wellbeing is the key to an enthusiastic, hardworking and committed team. The benefits of which will reflect in museums as a whole. Visitors and communities will become more integrated in museums. They will take ownership of museums’ collections and displays, playing a key part in contributing to curatorial decisions and developing new and diverse ways of sharing knowledge. In the future, museums will be cultural networks that everyone will be a part of.

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SHAREABLE EXPERIENCES AND ADDED VALUE
Ryan Dodge, Digital Engagement Coordinator, Royal Ontario Museum

In the future museums will expand their thinking of what constitutes a visitor. With online visits to museum websites and social media accounts far outpacing physical visitation, it is time to understand that digital visitors are visitors too.

Today, the first place you have to capture someone’s attention is online and this will only increase going forward. A ticket purchase is no longer the measure of success, in the future, senior managers and boards will recognize that transformative online experiences are just as valuable as a physical ticket purchase. By providing a stellar experience from their first google search through to a robust and responsive digital engagement presence, museums will remain relevant in the future.

“In the future, museums will recognize that we can no longer attempt to tell people we are fun and interesting places to spend time, our community has to do it for us and museums need to provide and encourage those experiences onsite and online”

Museums and their leaders will also understand that their online and digital engagement presence has direct implications on their reputation, which has direct implications on their bottom line. The potential for physical visitors to share their experience online will only grow and museums will embed sharable experiences into their gallery spaces. Everybody is already a content producer. Museums will encourage and nurture the earned media that visitors are creating, allow it to happen and engage with it.

In the future, museums will recognize that we can no longer attempt to tell people we are fun and interesting places to spend time, our community has to do it for us and museums need to provide and encourage those experiences onsite and online. Visitors are visitors, whether onsite or online, both have the potential to add value to museums and in this will be recognized and celebrated.

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AGILE, ACCESSIBLE AND DISTINCT
Gina Koutsika, Head of National and International – Learning and Engagement, Imperial War Museums

Museums remain subject to market forces and ideological change and the landscape in which we function in the future is yet to settle to a coherent consensus. Forced change prevails as the norm and it makes for interesting times.

“The future is yet to settle to a coherent consensus – forced change prevails as the norm and it makes for interesting times”

Our museums will continue to serve, inspire and learn from and with our publics. To thrive (or even survive), we need to be truly accessible, while capitalising on our distinctiveness and developing our niche markets. All of our work has to become scalable, fundable, with measurable impacts, and able to offer audience benefits and progression. In my view, our future lies in successfully facilitating the interconnectedness of audiences within our unique offer and in being more in tune with communities, consciously contributing to the local, regional and national health and economy.

Even though we remain focused on connoisseurship and skills (engaging artists, academics, experts), our internal specialist expertise across the board is being structurally weakened and the different roles (programmer, curator, manager) are increasingly broadened and blurred. This is due to a reduced workforce, short-term contracts and project-funded posts.

Not having the luxury to develop specialist knowledge, skills and contacts, we will seek out partners within and outside our disciplines, our sectors, our communities, and even our countries. We will form informal and formal consortiums, complement each other and combine our resources towards common goals. We will successively become more agile and flexible and our practice will be led and underpinned by experience and understanding of how to blend different disciplines.

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SOCIAL IMPACT + UX + PHYGITAL
Clare Brown, Program Head, Master of Arts in Exhibition Design, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University, and Alin Tocmacov, Experience Designer and Associate Partner at C&G Partners, New York

Social impact is the “new hotness” in which museums find their place as agents of social change. From revitalizing the neighborhoods in which they are built, to serving as forums for dialogue around the provocative issues of our time, museums are not just bystanders or “witnesses to history”, they are becoming a voice and a force in shaping the social future. Museums are looking to create emotional experiences that inspire visitors to take action. Narrative storytelling inspired methodologies like the Inzovu curve are moving visitors from empathy to compassion, to action. Emotion-driven museum experiences will not merely present the facts, but will provide opportunities and stimulate visitors to engage proactively in the world around them.

“Emotion-driven museum experiences will not merely present the facts but will provide opportunities and stimulate visitors to engage proactively in the world around them”

User eXperience design and methodology are inspiring exhibit designers to consider exhibitions as nimble platforms for information exchange and social engagement. Using the Agile approach of “minimum viable product” to create rapid prototyping on the exhibit floor, these design tests are becoming the inspiration for the final design itself. Museums are asking for changeability: flexible and update-able exhibits, that can respond to the fast pace social media savvy visitors. This will not be just a means to save on future exhibit costs, but rather a strategy to stay current and engage visitors in the creation of exhibitions as part of the social mission of the museum.

Phygital, physical + digital, is bridging the digital with the physical world. The internet of things will lead to the internet of spaces as digital technology becomes increasingly integrated into our built environments. Integration is the key term here, meaning that museums will not lose their valuable role in providing the essential analog experience of direct access to real collections. Rather, as the appeal of the analog world in a digital age continues to grow, museums will embrace their analog roots, providing unique physical and non-digital social experiences that are augmented and informed by digital applications and methodology.

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CONVERSATIONAL, FLEXIBLE AND FLUID
Mike Sarna, Director, Collections & Public Engagement, Royal Museums Greenwich

What will museums be like in the future?

Personally something emerges out of the question – What will museums be like in the future? It about what defines “us” aka this country and/or humankind? What are we saving/sharing/promoting? Who gets to decide? Things that are disappearing? Things that are emerging? What happens when you run out of space? These aren’t rocket science questions, of course, but they are questions my friend (a tour guide in Washington D.C.) gets every day – why doesn’t John Adams get a memorial? And what would I need to do to “earn” one? And what do we do when “the war to end all wars” doesn’t? The beauty is the answer changes year to year. So there is something about museums ability to be conversational, flexible and fluid.

So it left me thinking that museums are essentially about how we got where we are today, which is very political. Why isn’t the Museum of London running an exhibition about the global financial crisis? Do they have Lehman Brothers stuff in their collection, or pics of the corporate jet from RBS? Interesting to see the Snowden laptop at V&A, what other contentious contemporary objects should we be putting on display? A museum’s asset is to tell the story of the past – including the very recent past – to inform the present and help spur discussion on contemporary issues.

“What are we saving/sharing/promoting? The beauty is the answer changes year to year. There is something about museums ability to be conversational, flexible and fluid”

So, a new museum I just visited has an exhibition about the history of ship building in their area but if want to know why there is no shipbuilding in the area now, the answer is not there. Why should political questions only be discussed in the “media space”? A museum, a physical space, can provide an environment in which evidence and counter evidence can be presented, and facilitate an active and vital discussion – one more valuable than is being discussed in the media.

There is an underlying implication from this question. Do we need to change? It is interesting to see how zoos are fast adapting to the changing world in which we live. Many zoological societies have repositioned themselves as champions of endangered species and breeding programmes. They’re now seen as defenders of animal welfare, a complete about-face to the general image of a generation ago. Maybe the question should be reframed; What do museums need to do in the future to remain relevant and a trusted resource?

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TRANSPARENCY, AUTHENTICITY AND PARTICIPATION
Lisa Leblanc Director, Creative Development, Canadian History Hall at Canadian Museum of History

Museums have spent the better part of a generation in an identity crisis, querying their social role and value, and perhaps their underlying purpose. Were they research facilities, amusement parks, educational institutions, storage vaults? Technological change, though not inherently a game changer, raised additional questions about shared authority, democratization, and access.

But amidst change and uncertainty, there was constancy too, and not all of it about budget challenges or keeping abreast of everything digital. Museums continue to have one special and unique trait: the public trusts them, and more so than any other institution, public, private, or commercial. It is the perfect brand value proposition.

How might it be maintained in an increasingly crowded marketplace of ideas, where ‘curating’ has been stripped of professional context to sell home décor and breakfast foods, vacation travel and fashion trends? How perhaps might museums even expand it, moving beyond the status quo (however enviable) to positions of societal leadership?

“Leveraging – and sharing – authenticity, museums can transcend institutionalism or parochialism to demystify a shared humanity in a singular world”

It is not far-fetched. Already valued, reliable and demonstrably useful in societies made cacophonous by mind-bending quantities of data, museums consistently provide the least biased, most critically neutral interpretations of the past. It is an extraordinary competitive advantage.

Working transparently, museums must now move beyond mere representations of evidence to demonstrate explicitly how knowledge is developed, shared, or revisited. Making evident the gaps or omissions in our knowledge, identifying marginal or absent voices, helps audiences to explore with confidence and promotes engagement through nuance, perspective, and diversity. Authoritativeness has not enhanced cultural institutions, but authenticity has. Leveraging – and sharing – authenticity, museums must speak from multiple points of view, encouraging stakeholder and audience participation, even while bolstering scholarship. In assisting audiences to better understand how the past informs the present, how patterns and similarities can be observed in the seeming diversity and idiosyncrasies of history, museums can transcend institutionalism or parochialism to demystify a shared humanity in a singular world.

Whether museums remain physical destinations or digital tools is of little importance. It is not the container that will define them. Public trust will. Continued vigourous inquiries, courageously shared; democratized access to knowledge and uncertainty; transparent professional practices and accountability: these are the cornerstones of the museums of the future.

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IMPORTANT SHARED EXPERIENCE
Kaywin Feldman, Director and President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Museums in the future will be extremely crowded. They will be open longer hours because they will have become an even more integral part of our daily lives. As community gathering centers, they will offer a wider range of program and audience engagement. Our understandings of the meaning of culture, collaboration, and participation will all become more expansive, thereby broadening the ways in which institutions can connect with our diverse communities.

“Our understandings of the meaning of culture, collaboration, and participation will all become more expansive, broadening the ways in which institutions can connect with our diverse communities”

I’m one of those people who believe that museums have become increasingly important in our chaotic, stress- and distraction-filled world. Since museums offer experiences, memories, and the self-directed exploration of content, they will beckon as a necessary respite from our often isolated, digital and virtual lives. Besides, in a world where we can fake anything, from art, to the news, to genetically manufactured food, the need to experience the real thing will only become greater.

Ultimately, museums matter because they are filled with wondrous things that remind us of what it is to be human. Our shared experience is expressed in so many interesting, exciting, and impactful ways. As the philosopher Alan Watts said, “the meaning of life is life itself”. Museums are full of life: past, present, and future.

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ENGAGING AUDIENCES MORE DEEPLY
Ellie Miles, Interpretation Officer, The British Museum and Sascha Priewe, Managing Director, Royal Ontario Museum

Over the last couple of decades the arrival of digital technologies brought constructive disruption to museums. Museums who have experimented with digital projects, including online learning, digitization, born-digital collections or digital methods in visitor studies (a few examples amongst many) will have discovered how creative and collaborative their staff can be. As control of museums’ digital activities settles down in organizational structures, the best museums will have gained a greater understanding of the range of skills amongst their staff, and glimpsed how they can be combined with external expertise and participatory projects.

“The best museums will have gained a greater understanding of the range of skills amongst their staff, and glimpsed how they can be combined with external expertise and participatory projects”

These lessons will augment museums’ longer-term experience. Museums have always been iterative institutions, adapting and amending their collections, research, methods and exhibits as time passes. Collections grow, research evolves and attitudes toward the ‘public’ have been progressing. This process will continue, and small-scale interventions and experimental research projects will help museums to develop their ideas. Museums will need to work hard to maintain knowledge gained through this work.

With qualification-inflation and the proliferation of people keen to enter the museum workforce (despite continued pressure on wages), staff, increasingly on temporary contracts, will develop portfolio careers, moving in and out of museum work more often. As project-funded workforces shift, the networks and links between museums will strengthen. Inside museums, staff will continue to get better at working with different teams, including participants from outside the museum. Curatorial expertise will be valued and other expertise will be acknowledged too, as the participatory museum approach grows. The curator will rarely be spoken of as the embodiment of the museum, as museums recognise that it is the combination of ideas, collections, skills and people that is important.

Curators and others will form teams composed of people with complementary and equally valued skill sets. These collaborations will bring new combinations of skills to bear on museum projects, helping museums to create engaging exhibitions and programs, linking insight and skills from web, visitor services, designers, curators and learning teams bringing into balance the visitors’ demands with what the museum can supply. By thinking of the visit as an event, and one that fits into the context of visitors’ lifestyle choices, museums will be able to enrich their offer, and will diversify and engage their audiences more deeply and enduringly.

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ART MUSEUMS, AN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE
Silvia Filippini-Fantoni – Director of Interpretation, Media and Evaluation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) indicate that attendance to museums, art museums in particular, continues to decline at least in the United States both in terms of audience share and size. This is in part due to the lingering effects of the economic downturn but also and especially to the changing demographics. While older Americans continue to visit, the drop is coming mostly from the younger well-educated but less committed Millennial generation and potentially their offspring. This drying-up of the pipeline imperils the very future of art organizations, and if not reversed, there might be very few art museums to go to in the not so distant future.

“Museums need to experiment with new ways of engaging their audiences, particularly the millennial generation, which is more interested in social interaction, participation and self-discovery than more traditional learning”

Given these premises, the current business model on which many American art museums are based, which relies heavily on traditional and more passive forms of engagement, large endowment draws and donation from an aging donor base is not sustainable in the long term. So the biggest priority for most art institutions in the United States in the next few years is to implement a digital age shift in their business model. What does that entail? While there is no clear answer as every institution is different and needs to figure out what works for its community, geographical location, and collection, it is paramount that art museums embark in a journey of rediscovery and reorganization. Art organizations need to evaluate and rethink their admission policies, price structure, membership benefits, marketing strategies and fundraising approaches. They need to experiment with new ways of engaging their audiences, particularly the millennial generation, which is more interested in social interaction, participation and self-discovery than more traditional learning. In order to support such changes it is important for cultural leaders to gain a deeper understanding of the business and management side of things and support infrastructural changes within their institutions that foster experimentation and innovation.

As with many issues, a good place to start is to admit that there is a problem. I am fortunate enough to work for an institution that has made financial sustainability a priority for the next five to ten years. This has already brought a number of structural changes and forced us to experiment with different ways of engaging and communicating with our audience. While some of these experiments might fail, admitting that we cannot afford to operate in the same way we have done in the past hundred and fifty years is a very important step in the long-term process of finding a new and sustainable model that works within the context of our changing society.

So going back to the original question: what will museums, particularly art museums, be like in the future? The answer is: I am not sure yet but what I know is that if we want them to still be open and relevant thirty years from now, a paradigm shift needs to happen very soon.

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FUTURE OF MUSEUMS: ENTREPRENEURIAL AND CREATIVE
Lucy Shaw, Oxford University Museums Partnership Manager and Oxford Cultural Leaders Programme Director

One thing is clear – the future will not be the same, and that is not a bad thing at all.

Museums need to look beyond public funding, to reinvent themselves as businesses, albeit not-for-profit, with entrepreneurial ways of thinking and behaving. There is a clear need for leaders who are prepared to do things differently and break from the past.

I’m very interested in the term ‘entrepreneurial’ as it’s being used ever more frequently and much store is being placed on museums and their leaders becoming ‘entrepreneurially minded’. But what does this mean? It’s not just about coming up with great money spinning schemes – it’s about working with, and supporting museums to develop really creative and awesome ideas that overcome problems and stimulate change. It’s about having the confidence to take risks and accept that ‘the money will follow’.

“It’s about museums developing really creative and awesome ideas that overcome problems and stimulate change. It’s about having the confidence to take risks and accept that ‘the money will follow”

Here at Oxford University Museums, we have been developing initiatives to address the challenges facing the museum sector. For example, in March 2015, after two years of research and development, we ran the Oxford Cultural Leaders (OCL) programme for the first time in partnership with colleagues from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. We brought together 17 directors and senior managers from the UK, Europe and New Zealand, in an environment designed to be disruptive, yet supportive – where participants could experiment, feel able to take risks with ideas, break old habits, create new ways of thinking and behaving, and develop mechanisms for dealing with demanding situations. In other words, OCL encourages entrepreneurial ways of thinking and behaving.

This is the future for museums – to blend social and educational purpose with clever entrepreneurial practices and mixed-funding business models, underpinned by a deep understanding of, and connection to audiences who want to come back.

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MUSEUMS ARE FOREVER, REMOVE THE SHORT-TERM PRESSURE
Merel van der Vaart, PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam / Allard Pierson Museum

It is often said that museums are conservative by nature. They preserve our heritage for future generations and when working within the timeframe of forever an organisation is unlikely to change, or so we tell ourselves. But what if the opposite is true? What if many museums find it so hard to change, because they are trapped in the short-term cycles of project funding, temporary exhibitions and ever-changing (local) government demands? This way of working, from one deadline to the next, puts tremendous pressure on museums and leaves little room for reflection, defining your identity, and developing a vision for the future. This is especially challenging for small museums, with few paid staff and limited resources.

For museums to thrive and be relevant, now and in the future, we need to find ways to alleviate this short-term pressure. Technology is not the solution, but it can help. It allows museums to easily update gallery and online content, it lets them re-use and repurpose, and it can create space to be playful.

“The museum of the future will not be conservative. It will be ambitious about being an accessible, relevant, and flexible organisation. It will be confident about being unlike any other museum”

For many small museums the introduction of on-gallery technology has been challenging. Hardware is costly and almost all tech development, support, and maintenance have to be outsourced. This both has financial implications and prohibits staff from gaining new, digital, skills. In the future, technology should not only benefit museum visitors, it should enhance the organisation as a whole. For example, by allowing for quick content-updates and the re-use of hardware, without the need of external support.

Technology can allow museums to be more sustainable and let the new evolve from the existing. Today, museums often only make an exhibition on a certain subject once. In the future, it should be common practice to revisit a theme, because society changed, the organisation changed, and with the help of technology something new can be developed that builds on the resources and research that were created before.

In addition, museum staff should be encouraged to experiment and play. By being playful we can bring new relevance to existing content, shine a new light on our historic collections and use our existing, digital, tools in exciting new ways.

The museum of the future will not be conservative. It will be ambitious about being an accessible, relevant, and flexible organisation. It will be confident about being unlike any other museum.

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RETAINING THEIR SENSE OF PUBLIC SERVICE
David Fleming – Director, National Museums Liverpool

I’d like to begin to answer his question by saying what I hope museums will NOT be like. I hope they are not all commercially-driven, but retain their sense of public service, which means that they are of value to, and used by all, not just by a few.

As we see public spending being rolled back, the museum sector is at risk of losing its public service ethos (or the ‘handout’ ethos, some delight in calling it), and ending up spending most of their energy scraping around for funds to keep going. I’m not against commerciality, or efficiency, but I am also of the view that a democracy works best when it tries hard to ensure that people with the least are not excluded from access to the good things in life by those who have plenty; in the UK we started to create a Welfare State more than 100 years ago, and among other things we have created the National Health Service (NHS), precisely because, as a nation, most of us think this way.

The NHS is the Welfare State in full flow, and it’s probably the UK’s best-loved institution. It’s the thing we appreciate most when we need it, and it’s the thing we would miss most if we were to lose it. The NHS is the institution we can be sure will feature most prominently in any General Election, as all political parties do their utmost to come across as its protector.

“Museums of the future need to find leadership that is brave enough to espouse the social value of these institutions, not to bend in the wind every time a politician demands to know what their economic value is”

Museums need to be more like the NHS, but the lukewarm support for museums in this Age of Austerity indicates that we have a long way to go; and this is because museums have not embedded themselves in the national psyche as essential to the health of the nation. Why? Because too many are still perceived as serving a restricted, privileged audience, including overseas tourists. Museums are too readily seen in terms of economic importance, rather than in terms of their social importance. This is despite the fact that many, if not most museums, no longer only serve privileged audiences.

No-one judges the NHS in terms of its economic value, and museums shouldn’t be judged like this either. Museums of the future need to find leadership that is brave enough to espouse the social value of these institutions, not to bend in the wind every time a politician demands to know what their economic value is.

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MUSEUMS AS YOUNG LEARNER’S CLASSROOMS
Charissa Ruth – Freelance Museum Educator, New York City

Schools located in museums are just one way museums will continue to be relevant and important in the future. Over the last few decades the role of education in the museum field has grown at a momentous rate and most museums now have an education department that provides a range of programs for visitors. There has also been an increasing amount of research about the development that occurs in the first five years of human life. Many museums are building off that research and offering more opportunities and services to encourage families with young children to explore and enjoy museums.

“Not only do museums provide an ideal place for learning but they also have the potential to create a vast community of museum advocates, people who will use and support museums all their life”

One of these opportunities is the creation of preschools and nursery schools located in or as part of museums. The museum preschool or nursery school is a home to a synthesis of early childhood and museum education theory and practices. This kind of singular experience helps foster a deep love of learning in the children who come through these programs, fostering lifelong learners. These children are also given the very fundamental building blocks to become aware members of the local and global community in which they belong. These institutions also represent the opportunity for greater participation of families and the community as a whole.

The students see themselves as part of the microcosm of the museum. They see the community of the museum and also the community with which the museum engages. They return day in and day out to a place that becomes a safe place, a second home in a manner of speaking. Not only do museums provide an ideal place for learning but they also have the potential to create a vast community of museum advocates, people who will use and support museums for the duration of their life.

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COMFORT, MEANING AND DELIGHT
Peter Gorgels, Internet Manager, Rijksmuseum

With the huge and growing range of leisure activities on offer, museums face increasing competition. Busy people with and without kids can choose between spending a day out at an amusement park, zoo, football match, cinema, out in the woods, on the dunes or at the seaside, or simply stay at home with their smartphone or game console for entertainment. No longer do museums stand for an experience that is intrinsically unique or significant.

At the same time, a very different trend is taking shape: a return to authenticity, to things that have real meaning and that might demand some extra effort but also offer a genuine experience that you can touch and feel. This trend opens up new opportunities for museums with their troves of unique and authentic objects.

“A trend is taking shape: a return to authenticity, to things that have real meaning and that might demand some extra effort but also offer a genuine experience This trend opens up new opportunities for museums with their troves of unique and authentic objects”

To flourish amidst these competing forces, the museum of the future must excel on several crucial fronts.

The museum of the future should be comfortable: Just as at modern stadiums, shops and cinemas, visitors expect museums to offer perfect service. They enjoy being pampered and expect all facilities – from e-ticketing to the cloakroom and restaurant – to be fast, efficient and flawless. All online and physical dimensions of their museum visit have to be seamlessly interwoven. Also important is the durability of the presentations. Stunning new architecture and interior designs made to look ultra-modern with all the latest technologies can often feel dated within just a few years.

The museum of the future should offer meaning: People today are increasingly seeking authentic experiences that give meaning to their lives. With their wealth of quintessentially authentic objects, museums are in an unparalleled position to offer such experiences. But no longer as authoritarian institutions: modern museum visitors want to follow their own interests and form their own opinions. The museum of the future will therefore function more as a ‘meaning platform’ where users are inspired to chart their own course and to become, as it were, designers and artists themselves. The digital domain has a logical role to play in this development, of which the Rijksmuseum’s Rijksstudio is a good example.

The museum of the future should delight: Visitors want to see fresh and modern exhibits in an open environment that also offers surprises. Artworks should be spotlighted in special ways to help them shine, juxtaposed with playful accents that bring a smile to visitors’ faces. Highbrow and lowbrow displays can be alternated in a natural ebb and flow. People should not feel ‘drained’ by a visit to the museum, but delighted.

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WHEN THE MUSEUM GROWS INVISIBLE
Bhavani Esapathi, Digital Innovation Consultant

How is the museum going to look in the future? We’d be making a fundamental error to consider the museum as an entity on its own without looking at the progressively changing digital landscape.

The emerging technologies have given rise to nuanced notions of space, identity and everyday mechanisms from ordering a taxi (Uber) to being a consumer. One is no longer just a consumer, we’re simultaneously both consumers and by the very act of consuming, producers of new markets. Under such tightly woven yet ever-evolving creative communities, how will we accept and make space for museums and other such art ventures?

“Let’s dedicate our time now to discovering in what way museums needs to be shaped to allow them to be included amidst the chaotic overload of things that continue to populate the digital landscape”

Our present digital landscape has already blurred the lines between public and private spaces, it would be safe to assume this trend will continue into the future. The museum as an institution will adapt to becoming highly personalised and the way we consume everything that a museum can offer will need to be packaged within the dynamics of such emerging markets.

Perhaps there is no single definition for the future museum but one that we carry in our pockets or watches. Which screen do we want to occupy is the big question? I’d want to be synonymous with the most dominant screen that has all the eyes & ears, is it going to remain to be our smartphones? Probably not. Let’s dedicate our time now to discovering in what way or form museums needs to be shaped that not just promotes inclusivity rather, allows for the museum to be included amidst the chaotic overload of things that continue to populate the digital landscape.

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REBOOTING THE MUSEUM BUSINESS MODEL
Ben Hamley, Manager of Audience Research, Strategy and Advocacy, Queensland Museum

There is a gap in the market for a museum with no exhibitions.

Working in audience research, when I ask people what value they get from a museum experience, I always hear the same kind of thing. A story about an object, or an idea about the way the world works. This tells me something; that people come to museums for stories and ideas – not for exhibitions. Yet exhibitions are ‘what we do’, they are our primary product.

I believe that fundamentally, museums are content distribution businesses, and content businesses everywhere are undergoing massive transformations towards on-demand / access-over-ownership models (Netflix / Spotify). Museums are already halfway there with an established ‘access premium’ advantage for one-of-a-kind objects of significance.

If we follow the thread of the digital age forwards into the maturity of Internet-of-things / automation technology, I believe we will see the emergence of an entirely new class of museum. The on-demand museum.

This future museum will have far fewer (zero) exhibition teams and a great deal more interdisciplinary creatives, storytellers, interpreters, translators, concierges, chefs…. and robots. They will become hybrids of five-star hotels and swiss-bank vault viewing rooms.

– Robots (For Collection Management): Amazon own a company called Kiva Systems, whose robots operate the warehouse inventory and order fulfillment systems of Amazon in a way that treats a system of modular shelves like most majestic game of never-ending-chess you could ever imagine. Museums are already feeling the pinch with regards to space. A future museum will solve this problem by doing away with many and varied compacti, allowing collection transfers to be handled by kin of Kiva. Architecturally challenged institutions may even reclaim gallery space because exhibitions are redundant. Storage facilities will be redeveloped, even museums who choose to stick with exhibitions will benefit from the rapid random-access to their collections.

– Collection As Database – On-Demand, Snackable Content: A digitised and automated collection automatically updates the availability of items and tracks important factors such as light exposure, or rest-time required before next viewing. These variables will become part of the a new museum visitors literacy. It is highly likely that most visitors will pre-arrange their visits – often many months in advance. If a collection item has associated content or articles, they will be displayed on the in-room monitors for the visitor to engage if they desire. A cousin of Netflix’s content algorithm will match users with items they may enjoy, and schedule conservation works based on collection usage.

– Five Star Experience: A museum of the future will not have lines or crowds. There will be no tacky, wasteful single-use paraphernalia. Guests will have booked in advance – much like hotels today – and be greeted by a concierge who is expecting them, knows their preferences, and can anticipate their needs. The museum building itself will be barely recognisable. Great halls now replaced with private rooms, appointed to an unrecognisable level of luxury – a perk of consolidating the exhibition design budget into refurbishment. From individual item viewing or research term rooms all the way to mixed use function space and dining – there will be a room for any purpose, at any time of day. Rates will vary accordingly, however standard inclusions may offer a drink on arrival and 15-20mins with an expert generalist collection interpreter who assists visitors with their first selections or tells the story an item pre-arranged for viewing. Additional services include an interpretation officer or storyteller on hand at all times, or a seven course degustation – with matched objects.

– Set free through insight: And finally – museums will have succeeded in overcoming two of their greatest existential risks; collection use and relevance, and audience insight. Their multi-million item collections will be mobile, accessible and monitored to ensure utilisation. But perhaps more importantly; museums will have available at their fingertips, precise customer information, collection preference information and a variety of other data-points on their operations that have never before been considered – let alone measured.

I don’t expect every museum of the future to be like the one described here, but for those willing to invest in designing a better business model for museums – the rewards are waiting.

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AUTHENTIC, TRUSTED, ACCESSIBLE
Mark Graham, Director of Research, Canadian Museum of Nature

The future is full of tall challenges and that is not a new thing. Some of those are certain, and of the serious-decision-making-new-direction sort. We know this because we can count, and we know the human population is growing faster than we can accommodate. Every economic, environmental and social challenge can be traced in short order to our remarkable ability to reproduce and survive. Considering the road ahead, the museum of the future has important roles to play.

“The future museum will provide easy access to its trusted knowledge base, and to the stories to be told. Relevant, successful museums will find affordable, timely solutions for this access”

Museums are full of trusted evidence (collections) marking time and place that we use to tell stories to remind us of what has happened on Earth, and beyond. It reminds us of the way we live our lives (our cultures), and how millions of other species live their lives. More than ever, we will use that knowledge to be informed, and to nourish our sense of being. The evidence will remind us of what we like and need most, and help us to plan for those things more and better. The collected knowledge will also remind us of the worst we are capable of. If we are wise and strong the knowledge will be used to guard against our failures.

The future museum will provide easy access to its trusted knowledge base, and to the stories to be told. Relevant, successful museums will find affordable, timely solutions for this access, made possible by adapting to ever-emerging technology; a continuing enslavement. Because of their authenticity and new-found accessibility, museums will be the enduring “-pedias”.

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THE FUTURE IS NOW
Adam Reed Rozan, Audience Development Manager, Oakland Museum of California

For most centenarians, a birthday is a celebrated with family, friends, and the chance encounter on the local news for such a feat. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for museums, our communal super-centenarians, which now, more than ever, believe thinking and acting younger is better, and reinvention is key.

This trend started several years ago, and is easily spotted in marketing departments, which are now re-titled with fancy descriptors like audience development. New to this mix is engagement, a role/function which stems from the need to further align curatorial, marketing, and education in an effort to capture the attention of today’s visitors. After all, it’s about the visitors.

“By using collections creatively, engaging in the dialogue and activity of today’s culture, while presenting our institutions as thought leaders is a glimpse of a hopeful future”

For museums and museum employees, the debate between objects and visitors will continue to grow – each side believing their argument is right. If the idea of museums being in the “forever” business is no longer a wise business model, what is? The future is a working relationship in which collections become the ‘all-stars’, used as entry points for visitors, including those who may only participate online. By using collections creatively, engaging in the dialogue and activity of today’s culture, while presenting our institutions as thought leaders is a glimpse of a hopeful future.

The next 10 years will continue to prove challenging for museums. Today’s issues will not dissipate; if anything they will multiply. Yet, despite such a negative outlook, many museums will thrive, using challenges as opportunities to test new business and engagement models, and, in doing so, meeting the future head on.

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FUTURE OF MUSEUMS: SUSTAINABILITY AND WELL-BEING
Tony Butler, Director, Derby Museums

How different will museums be in the future? On the surface not much. They will still be situated in large buildings, they will still have abundant collections and people will still desire to see and feel the real thing. I hope they will be as diverse as they are now.

The museums of the future that will really connect with their audiences will be the ones which place sustainability and well-being at their heart. They’ll reflect the global challenges of climate change and the decline in living standards with which we are now becoming familiar. Museums should not just see themselves as places for learning or houses of collections but as civic connectors leading the re-imagining of a more liveable world.

“The museums of the future that will really connect with their audiences will be the ones which place well-being at their heart. Museums should not just see themselves as places for learning or houses of collections but as civic connectors leading the re-imagining of a more liveable world”

As more and more public space is privatised museums should realise their advantages as accessible places for encounters. They’ll also be rallying points for the community, leading local campaigns, connecting up civic society groups, using their collections in a more activist way to illuminate local concerns. Alternatively they should realise their roles as places for sanctuary from commercial messages and reflection.

Being a high well-being, sustainable organisation isn’t just about programming or collecting decisions. It is as much about institutional behaviour. Museums should be judged on what they are as well as what they do. Ask the following questions:

• Do you have people who play a true leadership role in local civil society?
• Do local people make decisions both about programming and governance?
• Do you actively lead campaigns in your locality based on clearly articulated values?
• Have you ever measured the museum’s impact on the environment?
• Have you ever shared your assets with community groups and enterprises?
• Do you really know how emotionally engaged your users are? Are they happy or sad or are they just indifferent?

Embracing these challenges could lead to an invigorating transformation that places museums at the heart of an active public realm with significant benefits for society and museums alike.

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DEMOCRATISATION AND CO-PRODUCTION
Iain Watson, Director, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Over the next 5 – 10 years, I think, and hope, that the big change in museums will be a further shift in the balance of power between funders and investors, museum staff and volunteers and museum users.

The last 20 years have seen great strides in democratisation and co-production, with fantastic exhibitions and projects led by and initiated by user groups. In publicly funded museums we need to see more of a join up between consultation and engagement and the overall strategic direction of the organisation.

Current initiatives around impact assessments and public consultations on the expenditure of public money are often either very high level (for example Whole Council level), or very specific (for example at ward level). I am convinced that museums will develop new ways of bringing their users in, not just to plan an exhibition on the story of a particular locality. The permeability of museums and communities to each other will increase.

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COLLABORATION AND IMAGINATION
Celia Dominguez, Education and Development Officer, Museum of East Asian Art

The future of museums is becoming a balancing act between surviving the devastating consequences of funding cuts and striving to make the best of the creative minds working in the sector. Over time, the image of museums has evolved throughout history. Two centuries ago, the French author and politician Alphonse de la Martine (1790 -1860) said that museums were “the cemeteries of the arts”, you can find similar quotes by John Burroughs (1837 –1921) or J.D. Salinger when he writes in his infamous novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) “…museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. …Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” Contrary to these ideas of immobility associated to museums we can affirm that, no matter how hard the current situation is, museums are experiencing an exciting and vibrant moment. We proudly belong to one of the few sectors that does not completely stop because of the lack of funds since our capital also relies on so many other aspects such as collaborations, contributions, partnerships etc. The use of imagination in order to get as many visitors involved as possible in what is not now just a “place full of objects” but rather a total vital experience. Therefore it is not the “Big Society” but the passion, creativity and will power of all the professionals in the sector that is going to put the weight on the right side of the balance.”

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REFLECTING IN REAL-TIME
Julie Obermeyer, Curator and Manager, The Peace Museum

I work for an independent museum that currently has little technology (display screens, computer interactive consoles, hand-held devices, etc) in its galleries. But increasingly I see museums embracing new technologies and opening up to the idea and practice of more democratically created exhibitions with museum audiences as co-creators. These changes have been taking place for some time and will continue apace into the foreseeable future but what will remain that will distinguish museums from theme parks and entertainment centres is the fact that museums have historically important collections and staff who have the expertise to make creative but informed use of the collections.

With the opening up of museum interpretation by more democratic practices museum interpretation will change quite significantly in the years ahead. Specifically, museums will be able to move further away from having a dominant narrative to multiple narratives which can dialogue with one another and with museum audiences both meaningfully and respectfully. This will in turn affect the content and themes which museums will want to cover and will effectively enable museums to approach subjects and themes which hitherto may have appeared too problematic or controversial for them to want to tackle. This will in turn provide museums with more confidence to respond to and reflect on more contemporary topics, almost in real-time. Contemporary collecting will become more important, too, as museums rise to the challenge of being more responsive to the unfolding of recent events.

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UNIQUELY PLACED FOR REFLECTION
Richard Freedman, Director, South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation

In South Africa, as we struggle with the legacy of apartheid, including pervasive poverty, racism and xenophobia, the place of human rights and democracy education has assumed added importance. Museums are uniquely placed to engage in using history to reflect on contemporary issues. Using the platform of Holocaust history has proved successful in moving South Africans through time and space, away from the context in which they live, and by so doing to engage with their own history and the issues of our time.

The themes that run through the programmes conducted with school and university students, police and correctional services and in-service educators include the fragility of democracy, the dangers of stereotyping, marginalization, apathy and silence, all of which emerge so eloquently from Holocaust History. In a post traumatic society like South Africa there is a need to engage with our own past in order to recognize were we have come from and to find a way into the future. South Africans have not had sufficient opportunities for healing and thus the experience of visits to the Holocaust centre and exposure to its programmes have provided, for many, a sorely needed opportunity to reflect on the deep issues troubling us still.

South Africa’s High school curriculum is closely aligned to the National Constitution and Bill of Rights. Teachers are enjoined to infuse human rights awareness into all aspects of the curriculum. The inclusion of Holocaust studies as a mandated unit has begun to have significant impact and has placed our institutions in a unique position to support both teacher training and development of appropriate materials which contextualise the teaching of the Holocaust in South Africa’s own history. The South African Holocaust Centres (we do not refer to ourselves as museums) regard their permanent exhibitions as a teaching tool and we see that through their use as such we will be able in some measure to contribute to nation building. There is much work to be done.

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NO PLACE FOR ELITISM
Carlos Alejandro López Ramírez, Director, Salsa Museum – Cali, Colombia

First of all it is vital to reflect on museums in their own cultural and social context. It will be different for museums in Europe or North America, or as in my case, in South America, specifically in Colombia. The Latin American context is very different, so if the museums here do not become cultural centers where you can integrate education, recreation and preservations, in 15 years there are not going to be any museums. It is vital to show the community that the museum is not a temple or elitist, but a place where they can find leisure activities, knowledge, entertainment, and over all, identification of their own heritage and culture. Therefore, it is very important to have authentic governmental promotion policies for museums.

The fight for these rights must be done by the union of the museums administrators and workers; it is fundamental to work in networks and groups to have a real voice.

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 A NATURALLY COMPELLING FUTURE
Sharon Ament, Director Public Engagement, The Natural History Museum

In a world which necessitates the navigation of scientific issues for people to live their daily lives and one which has rapidly changing natural resources the future for natural history museums is compelling. As the repository of the world’s natural heritage the collective contribution that the international network of natural history museums can make to some of the most pressing scientific issues of the day is profound.

We in London alone have more than 70 million specimens and in European museums it numbers more than 500 million. Each collection has its strengths, built up over hundreds of years, drawn from particular geographies and with particular specialisms. Internationally this represents a rich picture of the world’s natural diversity over time and place; a resource which is drawn on by thousands of scientists each year. The future challenge is to consider it collectively as a shared global resource. To meet this challenge we will need to have stronger collaborations within the museum sector and beyond with universities, government agencies, libraries, digital enterprises and business.

Natural history museums are at the centre of public discourse. With the environment high on the agenda I can think of no other part of the museum sector that has the potential to engage at the highest political level and with such potency at the personal level. Looking to the future we will need to tread a careful path, as trusted institutions we must continue to guard public confidence in our objectivity, whilst putting forward strong views on evolution, climate change and biodiversity loss.

Moreover, simply by inhabiting the spaces we do in cities and towns, natural history museums will become even more significant, in the urban lives of the majority of the world’s population where perhaps we are the only connection with the natural environment for people who will never venture into or feel comfortable in the countryside.

Due to our roots to the past our contribution to the future is likely to have a greater impact than many of us can currently imagine.

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EVOLVING FOR THE 21st CENTURY
Roy Clare, Director, Auckland Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira, New Zealand

Museums face two major challenges: how to collect sustainably; and how to remain relevant. These challenges reflect the abiding principles of museums: collections-centred, audience-focused.

No museum can afford to acquire everything that is available. Discernment is crucial, coupled with a rigorous analysis of the collections, focusing both on acquiring and disposing.

Expectations of museums are changing. Leisure time is at a premium. Consumers make choices based on perceived value and potential for excitement. Some museums neglect their collections and become ‘attractions’, losing authority as places of scholarship and learning. Others fail to keep up with changing patterns of use, with risks for viability. Digital media are core to people’s lives, so museums need fluency in that environment too, from promotion and access to engagement.

Museum Boards and executives need to:

• Drive policies for managing collections. A whole life-cycle strategy should systematically encompass: goal-setting; acquiring new items; caring for collections; making as much as possible available to the public (physically, in galleries; virtually, on-line; and intellectually, through research programmes and published resources); assessing duplication and merit; and enabling disposal.

• Really understand their market. Including those people that are neither visitors nor users. Based on that evidence, decision-makers can reach conclusions about the style, pace and nature of programmes. Partnerships can support delivery in more than one location, reaching more diverse audiences, being innovative and generating revenues.

The profile of a museum starts with leadership and risk appetite; creative ambition and entrepreneurialism should follow, so that evolution matches public demand.

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LEADING SOCIAL CHANGE
Camilo Sanchez, Museum of Independence, Colombia

Museums in the future will have to respond faster to social and economical change. I am writing this while attending at an international museum conference, and I keep hearing byzantine discussions about the rather old conundrum of what is more important between objects or people, or how important, or not, it is to have standards in museums. I really hope that in the near future that kind of discussion will be superseded and we start talking seriously about how to become relevant social agents that can quickly adapt to a world that changes faster every day.

I know it might be Utopia, but I would love to see museums become important for communities, not only because they guard their heritage, but rather because they lead social change and become places that help to effectively solve problems (or at least think of solutions) that are becoming sadly recurrent, like economical global crisis, terrorism, rapid climate change, racial discrimination, increasing poverty and crime. That way, people will stop thinking that culture and museums are, like a Dutch politician stated recently, “a left-wing hobby”.

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TO PONDER AND PARTICIPATE
Ailsa Barry Head of New Media, The Natural History Museum

What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare?

This poem, published in 1911 by Welsh poet William Henry Davies, conjures up for me the very essence of a museum – a place to pause, reflect and ponder on the amazing world and universe that we inhabit. In the 21st Century I hope it continues to be as true as it was for the 20th Century. But the 21st Century is a very different environment from that of a hundred years ago, and the museum of the future will require a rethink on how to captivate a generation brought up on gaming and Facebook.

Our future visitors will expect to be able to enrich and layer their experience by seamlessly accessing multi-dimensional experiences about the objects around them through a plethora of personal mobile devices. Data about their visit will be captured and analysed in real time, giving a dynamic experience that responds to their needs. And they will want to respond, participate and share their experiences with a global audience as the mood takes them.

There will be challenges in meeting such demands. How much museums invest in creating such rich and varied experiences will be a significant consideration, and new partnerships and ways of working internally, regionally and internationally will be key to successful delivery. But in developing such a digitally rich and accessible environment, museums will be able to reach out and engage a broader global community – enabling them to stop, stare, ponder and participate with the world around them.

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CHANGE AND VARIETY
Mona Rashid Bin Hussain, Head of Adult and Academic Programmes at Sharjah Museums Department

Over the last 40 years almost 40 museums have opened around the United Arab Emirates (UAE). All of them are local government funded and half of them display heritage/history collections that are intended to preserve the cultural identity of the region. 10 years ago the common idea was that museums would display collections intended for the tourist market. Nowadays there is more variety. There are 22 museums in the Emirate of Sharjah and 9 museums in the Emirate of Dubai. Abu Dhabi is currently building a cultural district on Al Sadyaat Island which will include 2 internationally linked museums, the Guggenheim Museum and the Louver Abu Dhabi. It will also have two national museums, The Maritime Museum and The Zayed Museum. These expansions, part of Abu Dhabi 2030 Urban Structure Framework aim to place UAE on the cultural tourism map.

While museums are planned for a diverse population that reflects the large expatriate community of the UAE, the museum planners are researching ways in which a museum visit would become part of the local Emirati culture. Change is already evident with increasing number of studies have shown that people who visit museums in the past are the most likely to visit in the future. This will create a museums lovers’ community and hopefully a place where museums can be places where the community can learn about each other and the world around them.

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MUSEUMS ARE MIRRORS
Linda Duke, Director, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University

Museums are mirrors. In them we see the history and complicated features of ourselves, we the human beings. It doesn’t matter if the focal subject of a museum is history or culture, science or art, the natural world or the most “unnatural” outcomes of human activity; all museums are about us because we have made them. In their display cases and gallery installations museums show us in tangible forms the qualities of our own perceptions, understandings, and ways of thinking.

People are made up of many parts and pieces, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Some of these parts are not easily compatible – and so we keep them separate, often unconsciously. Museums reflect this tendency; science, art, and history each have their stories. The next challenge for museums is to become places where wholeness can be glimpsed, places that allow us to step above the separate narratives and benefit from the intriguing implications of their contradictions. The really enduring spiritual traditions of humanity have always had paradox at their cores; but they have also taught oneness. Oneness: so simple it hurts; so complex that the logical functions of our minds cannot encompass it.

Oneness is a spiritual insight; wholeness is its grounded, material counterpart. My hope for the future of museums is that they will become places that help us sense wholeness so that our science, arts, and history may bring us insight, not simply knowledge.

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FLEXIBLE AND RESILIENT
Gina Koutsika, Head of National Programmes and Projects, Imperial War Museums

My view is that the fundamental components of museums – collections and people – will remain the same. However, the way we define them has been evolving and will continue to do so to reflect social, political and economic trends. Our mechanisms of acquisition, conservation, access and delivery will also develop to mirror both technological advances and society’s attitudes to leisure activities and learning. Our programme of activities will be more focused on key strategic aims and comprehensive across teams.

We will probably become more flexible and resilient, both as institutions and as professionals. We will aim to be integrated and integral to our communities so that we build a culture of sharing and of creating mutually beneficial partnerships. The projects and programmes we prioritize will be increasingly more outwards looking and sustainable.

In the very near future, technologies such as cloud computing will change the way we work with each other and with our communities. Social networking will probably become more integrated in the way we operate, form partnerships and position our institutions. We will learn to be creative, effective and happy in an ever-changing environment.

Am I too optimistic?

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THE FUTURE IS INTERACTION
Jakub Nowakowski, Director, Galicia Jewish Museum, Poland

Museums that exist today are certainly different in many ways than those in the past. Before, museums were institutions of authority that transmitted specific messages down to the public about the past from behind glass display cases, tape, and “do not touch” signs. Gradually, they evolved into places that invite visitors to participate in an interactive and exciting journey. They have changed from institutions where information was directed in only one way: towards the viewer into institutions that are increasingly creating conversations with the viewer. Visitors are invited to participate, are pulled into the life of the museum, not only as passive spectators, but also as active participants.

The Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland, is one example of these new dynamic institutions, and has launched a variety of programs for visitors (both Polish and foreign) creating opportunities for them to use the museum space for their own cultural projects like plays, concerts, and temporary exhibitions that contribute to the museum. Through the “Museum Means More”, program the Galicia Jewish Museum held over 200 such events for all age groups.

It seems that the future of cultural institutions lies in interaction – and not just through the connections created by increasingly popular modern technologies – but, most of all, by inviting visitors to become involved in the life of the museum – their museum.

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RE-INVENT THE MUSEUM
Stuart Gillis, museum consultant

The near collapse of public sector funding leaves (UK) local authority run museums in the tightest of all situations. It is almost impossible for this sector to escape the current unprecedented savagery of cuts. And the introverted economy of local councils can leave managers without the entrepreneurial edge to compete in the harsh new environment.

The senior museum professional needs to consider if their part of the organisation has become an outpost of an over-reached empire in semi-terminal decline. If there is a plan to address this – jump on board: shape it; add value to it; do all that you can to maximise your influence. You may not be running the programme, but expand your authority by being the person who spends the most time building support and shaping agendas.

It is even better if you can be the person that makes the plan. Start by understanding the power priorities of your local area. Understand where power resides and what is it trying to achieve. Is it about jobs? Is it raising school attainment? Is it a major urban development? And then work out where the museum’s resources (collections, buildings, skills, values) can be best aligned to support this top agenda.

At this stage, work with and listen to as many people from beyond the museum as you can. Be prepared to re-invent what a museum is. Do not be swayed by pessimists. Come up with something that is highly relevant to your area; something that looks like part of the solution; something that captures the imagination; something that is too good to be ignored. And then dig-in and fight for it.

Our museums carry the incredible story of human creativity, a story often propelled forward through response to adversity. So don’t just aim to preserve our museums. Be inspired to take action by what we hold.

We will need vision, bloody-mindedness and a fair slice of luck. But the future of Museums can still be in our hands – if we’re good enough to realise it.

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AFRICAN MUSEUMS IN THE NEXT 2O YEARS
Okpalanozie Ogechukwu Elizabeth, National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria

The museums in Africa have come a long way, evolving from museums known only to the indigenous community into museums that are recognised globally because of the rich and unique collections in their custody.

The trend of development that is witnessed in African museums in the present day will be sustained in the next twenty years. In years to come, capacity building would have been achieved to a great extent, opening doors to greater impact of the museum on the indigenous communities. These museums will cease to function only as museums where collections are kept and exhibited for the public. The museums will use the tools they have: tangible cultural heritage, to develop the communities in which they exist. The development will cut across different aspects of the community: politics, education, human rights and health. The museums will be working hand in hand with the communities and the communities will feel the positive impact of the presence of the museums.

In addition to this, the museums will be in a better position to care for the collections in their custody. The emerging and young museum professionals working currently in African museums are participating in different types of training, workshops, and networking. The result of this proactive approach is museums with better ethical practices and stable collections.

In the next two decades, African museums will evolve into museums that will touch the lives and soul of African communities and custodians of stable and healthy collections.

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ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS AND OWNERSHIP
Corey Timpson, Director, Design + New Media & Collections, Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Museums, now more than ever, are looking for new ways to engage visitors. In a world that is dominated by rapid changes in attention, excessive multitasking, and massive media bombardment, it has become increasingly difficult to engage target audiences in meaningful ways. Yet some basic premises remain. Active participants, collaborators, shared owners, are more likely to care, to feel engaged in something, than those passively standing by.

Allowing for personalization is a simple way to attain a more engaged audience – via personalized content or personalized access to content. Providing an opportunity for visitors to engage in dialogue, and for this dialogue to be shared, is personalization taken to the next level.

Where a museum’s interaction model used to be the visitor is informed by the museum, a new interaction model of the visitor is informed by the museum – the visitor informs the museum – the visitor informs the visitor, will provide for greatly increased visitor engagement. The premise is not to ignore or do away with the museum’s responsibility to curate, to be authoritative or be a steward of its collection.

While it continues to evolve and rapidly change, technology will be an important facilitator of a dialogic interaction scenario, as museums look to build increased engagement among their target audience in meaningful ways.

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VIOLENCE AND MUSEUMS OF CONSCIENCE
Clint Curle, Researcher, Canadian Museum for Human Rights

My particular interest is in museums of conscience. When I think of the role of these museums in society, I always come back to something philosopher Paul Riccoeur once wrote: “there exists a place within society – however violent society may remain owing to its origin or to custom – where words do win out over violence” (Paul Riccoeur, The Just, ix). Museums, of course, are not limited to words alone but have an ever-expanding palette for presenting and representing subjects, and subtle forms of violence can tincture these representations. But the role of the museum of conscience in society fits well with Riccoeur’s insight – a bounded social space where reflection, memory and story win out over violence.

I think violence, broadly understood, is always the context and perhaps even the threat that constitutes the museum of conscience. Past violence and the ubiquitous potential for new violence makes the museum of conscience necessary.

Riccoeur’s words, however, also raise a concern. He wrote them in reference to a courtroom trial. One of the temptations that museums of conscience face is to function as courtrooms, places where evidence is sifted, perpetrators are sentenced and innocents are exonerated. Museums are not courtrooms, and are ill equipped to provide decisive adjudications of guilt and innocence regarding violence.

The task, then, of the museum of conscience is to create social space within which violence can be brought to light, representatively encountered and ultimately decentered, without becoming an ersatz courtroom. Museums of conscience have two potentialities which courtrooms lack; the capacity to foster empathy, and the capacity to stimulate rich conversations within and between people. The mining of these two potentialities as mutually constructive responses to violence, for me, represents the future of museums of conscience.

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THE MUSEUM OF TOMORROW
Jean-Yves Gallardo, Director of Communications, The National Museum of Art, Architecture & Design, Norway

‘Forum artist’ is the name the architect Klaus Schuwerk has given his winning proposal for a new building to house Norway’s National Museum, due to open in 2017. As a name for a museum it is well suited to our century.

In planning the museum, we try to imagine how art and audiences might come together five years from now, in an institution that not only houses and cares for a collection, but is also a meeting place of major social significance. In brief: a forum for the arts.

The museum of tomorrow should be able to satisfy the diverse approaches to time and space that its visitors are likely to apply; some will have just fifteen minutes to spare, some a couple of hours, while others will want to spend a whole day there. Should the museum be a white cube for contemplation, a black box for meditation, or a forum for production?

Gaining space and functionality is not enough. Added value lies in creating an environment where it is good to be, an arena for interaction between artwork, visitor, museum and society.

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PROMOTERS OF GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Nick Poole, CEO, The Collections Trust

Society needs museums to provide stability and context. People need museums to provide meaning, identity and entertainment. Industry needs museums to support innovation & development. For these reasons, I see a tremendously positive long-term future for museums worldwide as drivers of economic tourism, agents of social change and promoters of intercultural dialogue and tolerance.

The initial, disruptive generation of technologies will recede, leaving the museum of the future as a fundamentally and naturally hybrid organisation combining collections, technologies and relationships to engage new audiences. There will be less emphasis on digitising everything, and more on delivering value and lasting impact through integrated services.

I can foresee that the definition of ‘museum’ will become blurred – with an increasing number of heritage attractions and public-facing services which package heritage in new ways. While this will create a more competitive environment for individual museums, it will also help with the current oversupply of skilled museum practitioners. It will also provide us with new strategies to address the perennial challenge of stored collections and the relative lack of display space in our museums.

The international museum community is hardworking, professional and dedicated. Collectively, we perform an essential social, economic and personal role. Even though there is a profound lack of recognition of this from Governments in some countries, the value of museums is in the hearts and minds of the public they serve. Museums will continue to adapt to reflect the needs of their communities, and I am tremendously excited about what they have the potential to become.

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MUSEUM ARCHITECTURE
Ulf Grønvold, Senior Curator, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo

In 1792, three years into the French revolution, the National Convention in Paris decided that a state museum should be established in the Louvre. Museum galleries had been part of royal residences for several centuries, but it was in the first decades of the 19th Century the museum was developed as a building type. For the next hundred years museums were built to more or less look like palaces.

With the arrival of Modernism a new concept was introduced: The informal museum pavilion in an idyllic park. Modern architecture is often at its best in a virgin situation when it doesn’t have to relate to a demanding historic context. And the Kröller Müller Museum in the Netherlands and the Louisiana in Denmark illustrate the success of this approach. Starting with Ronchamp by Le Corbusier architecture became a giant version of modern sculpture. Guggenheim in Bilbao was celebrated as the museum of decade, but when Frank Gehry repeated the same shapes everywhere, it became too private a vocabulary, it was his signature and not buildings based in a lager social context.

The 21st Century should be a period of sense and sobriety. Museums are monuments of lasting values, and our buildings should express that without going back to the metaphor of the palace. We need museum buildings that belong to their location and their community, not the ego of a Star architect on a brief visit.

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GLOBAL MUSEUM COMMUNITY
Lucy Hockley, Adult Education Officer, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum

A favourite quote of mine is ‘not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child’ (Cicero). Museums have fantastic learning potential and can broaden their visitors’ horizons. This should be shared as widely as possible and explored more fully in the future.

On the other hand, a term often used in the press, ‘community’, is not generally one of my favourite words. Yet, I feel the term ‘museum community’ is used accurately and a just cause for pride at my current organisation, and I’m sure this is the case in many other museums. Issues around well-being and social involvement with heritage organisations are due further future consideration.

In the future I’d like to see museums working in innovative, imaginative ways whilst retaining their core principles. In-depth research and specialist knowledge is vital to underpin other museum activities. Volunteering roles will need to reflect changing models of work to engage wide sections of society and enable people to continue to contribute at different life stages in a way that suits individuals.

As funding cuts continue to be felt and organisations adapt, they will need to search for new sources of income but should resist being overly swayed by funder’s objectives or short-term agendas. Of course museums must show their relevance to society, but they can’t try to be everything to everyone.

Social media and other technologies will encourage museums to form links with others and increased international co-operation is the way forward.

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COLLECTIONS AND COMMUNITIES
Tracy Puklowski, Senior Operations Manager, Collections and Research, Museum of New Zealand -Te Papa Tongarewa

Museums build their reputations around their collections, and the knowledge and experiences that those collections generate. However, without recognising the real and ongoing connections between collections and communities, museums are only telling half the story. For this reason, I believe that one of the futures of museums (for there are many) revolves around the notion of shared authority.

Rather than giving up curatorial authority, shared authority enhances curatorial knowledge by recognising the significant impact communities (and particularly source communities) can have on our understanding of the collections that we keep in trust on their behalf. In turn, communities benefit from the knowledge that museums build around collections. Objects need multiple and varied voices to tell their stories fully. Source communities, particularly, have social, spiritual, and innate connections to objects – and they accordingly have a right to define that knowledge, and how it is used. This requires the creation of fully reciprocal partnerships between museums and communities, as well as processes that are transparent, accessible, and flexible.

Shared authority requires museums to rethink their role as guardians of collections. Rather than being about guarding or owning collections, guardianship is about using and holding collections responsibly, and this includes the obligation to find new ways of sharing collections – intellectually, physically, and virtually.

Without learning how to explore, understand, and enhance the connections between collections and communities, museums will tell limited stories and consequently limit their futures.

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GUIDED TOURS BY ROBOTS?
Lin Stafne-Pfisterer, Museum Educator, Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway

The future of the museum, I think, will move in parallel directions. Increased digitalisation in all areas of life is already changing museum reality. This will be even more important in the future. Recently, I listened to a science researcher telling children about their digital future. He convinced them, that in 50 years, a robot will wake up the children in the morning, and assist families at home. We’ve heard this before, but these days we see mechanical human look-alikes being developed. Transferred to the museum, it is maybe not that far out to imagine a robot giving a guided tour presenting art works in a museum.

Still, I believe that the digital development will bring exclusivity to museum experiences with personal guides for smaller groups. The handmade art work will perhaps be given an almost reliquary-like value in a growing digital society. Increased development of digital material for exhibitions is perhaps most interesting when recreating the past: creating virtual versions of destroyed buildings, sculptures and artist’s homes that are materially lost.

The growing “edutainment” functions of museums will probably continue, but I hope research based museums will have more sustainability bringing valuable content to their visitors. Last, but not least, I think we will see much more participation from museum visitors, who will be actively involved in the exhibition processes.

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CULTURE OF DIGITAL CREATIVITY
Steph Mastoris, Head, National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

If the study of the past teaches us anything it is not to trust predictions for the future! So my thoughts about the future of museums are really more about how I feel and hope current technological developments will shape them over the next few decades.

Of course, in any institution worthy of the name “museum” the prime resource is its collections. It will be fascinating, therefore, to see how these artefacts will be made available and experienced as the digital age progresses. While the ease of physical and virtual replication will increase and become more sophisticated, the “magic” of experience of the original, real artefact is bound to become more important to people. In this way we should all be winners.

Such increased access to collections is also bound to improve interpretation. Indeed, the very media that will allow artefacts to be accessed remotely will also provide limitless possibilities for dynamic, user-driven interpretation. Already we are experiencing how sophisticated, multi-layered narratives can be delivered through digital media. And what is equally exciting is that such information uses (in fact demands) material from a wide range of traditional museum disciplines. Digital interpretation is bound to create more joined-up working by museum professionals, so the future museum is surely going to be not only multi-disciplinary, but inter-disciplinary.

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ERA OF THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM
Christine Conciatori, Content Project Manager, Canadian Museum for Human Rights

In an era where technology and new media seem to evolve faster than we can keep up, what is the future of the museum? We are already living in the era of the virtual museum. Museums are not made of just bricks and mortar. Technology has been entering museums for a number of years already and has changed the face of these institutions. Touch screens and interactivity are now common parts of a museum visit. Furthermore, museums around the world are now accessible on the web and social media is now a part of daily museum life.

Visitors, experienced and knowledgeable with technology, expect museums to follow these trends. They want opportunities to interact with museum content. Visitors’ expectations for rapid change are also increasing. Museums have to address these expectations by being increasingly dynamic.

Museums are also increasingly becoming overt places of dialogue. New technologies are a wonderful way to reach visitors. But, as with any mean of communication, even the best technology has its limitations. Museums must stay relevant to the society of which they serve, they must also work to expand their reach.

Using the web, museums can reach a wider audience, and within this audience, touch a segment of people who have not traditionally been museum goers. However, using technology cannot be simply motivated by the desire to have a “cool app”. Technology is not a goal in itself. It offers a powerful medium to deliver a message, content to the visitor, in person or virtually. The pressure to attract new visitors forces museums to try to be more “seductive”. New technologies may be part of the answer; however, it cannot be empty and devoid of substance. Without a solid message, technology merely becomes a gimmick. The message is what sets museums apart.

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HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
David Fleming, Director, National Museums Liverpool

The only thing threatening a bright future for museums is museum people themselves, should they fail to persuade the politicians who provide most of the funding for museums that in doing so they are supporting something that has fundamental social and educational importance.

Over the past twenty or so years, museums have begun to come into their own, worldwide, as cultural phenomena that play a number of roles: they have educational power; they have social impacts; they have economic impacts. Museums are valued in all countries for at least one of these roles, and in some countries they are valued for all of them. Consequently, the future for museums should consist of playing these roles, which will vary, obviously, depending upon local circumstances.

The most exciting and valuable role that museums should develop is fighting for social justice – through campaigning for human rights and protection of the environment, and through championing inclusivity. Museums are there to serve the whole of society, and they need to work hard to serve marginalised groups and individuals, not be content with super-serving traditional museum-going audiences.

Funding for museums will ebb and flow, as ever, but a commitment to social justice is the best way in the long term to secure financial support from the rest of society. It’s a commitment that will always be needed, and will always be valued.

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RETHINKING THE MUSEUM
Alex Saint and Steve Connor, Independent consultants and co-authors of Rethinking The Museum

In Rethinking the Museum, a series of thinkpieces commissioned by NW Fed, we look forward to the year 2030. Read it, debate it, it’s complex and impossible to summarise in a few words. So let’s just take one idea forward here….

We progress the idea that a visit to a museum should be like getting a rush of the hormone oxytocin – the cuddle chemical or empathy-drug – and deliver an extraordinary group hug. Museums as the virtual equivalent of the social-media network, joined-up, connected, commissioned delivery agents for social change, trusted, healing fractures, glueing, bonding – and above all developing our individual and community capacity for real empathy.

Indeed, we’d argue even more strongly now that the desire to create a developed capacity for human empathy should the principal purpose of museums – raised collective empathy and conscience is crucial for the successful re-engineering of our ecologically and economically fractured society, our best way out of seemingly unsolveable social and political drift and rift.

So, in our oxytocin-charged museum, collections are used to foster an understanding of the histories and ideas that matter – of suffering, of self-expression and of achievement, and also to elicit a positive response, to prompt creative conversations, and draw out the desire to share and build a better world, locally and globally. Are these Museums of Social Justice, or Social Enterprise? We prefer to call them Museums of Empathy, which work as hard to bring about a change in attitude or behaviour in the mainstream visitor, the corporate supporter, the cross-sector partner as they do with the disenfranchised communities and individuals that so many museums seek to engage, but too often with limited real or lasting impact.

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TO BE PART OF THE SOLUTION
Peter Stott, Team Leader Heritage, Falkirk Community Trust

Here’s the ICOM definition of a museum: ‘A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.’

ICOM acknowledges that the definition of a museum evolves ‘in accordance with the realities of the global museum community’. In other words museums themselves need to evolve to survive and prosper in their changing ecosystem.

There is increasing and, despite the efforts of governments, increasingly unavoidable evidence to demonstrate what the change in the ecosystem consists of – resolving the interconnected system of climate change, resource scarcity, failing economic models and social injustice. An accumulating array of cultural bodies – for example Culture Futures, Royal Society of Arts, Museums Association, Mission Models Money and Visual Arts and Galleries Association – recognise, first that economic policy which tries to reignite the growth and consumer-based economic model is folly on a monumental scale, and second that the cultural sector can be part of the solution to the problem if it takes two things on board:

• That the cultural sector can engage with people’s imaginations to facilitate the behavioural change necessary for sustainable living

• That the bricks-and-mortar institutional models of delivery created by the passing ecosystem will not suffice as the basis for prospering in the emerging ecosystem.

This is the ‘big project’ of our era. So what would the next evolutionary stage in the definition of a museum look like? Here’s a proposal:

‘A museum is a public, collective process by which people are enabled, through understanding their relationship to the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, to contribute to the long-term well-being of communities and sustainability of environments, globally and locally.’

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Join the #FutureMuseum Project and add your thoughts on the future of museums. Email approx 500 words to info@museum-id.com

The post The FutureMuseum Project: Add Your Voice to the Future of Museums appeared first on Museum-iD.

About the author: Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Dan is a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, a Trustee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and directs the AHRC-funded Oxford University Museums Collaborative Doctoral Partnership programme. He has published widely and his books include The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (2010) and World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum (2013). Dan spoke at the Museum Ideas 2016 conference in London. 

What will the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford look like in fifty years time? I’m probably the wrong person to ask. I’m an archaeologist, so my academic discipline is usually concerned with thinking about the past not the future. And I’m a museum curator, so my institution is normally concerned with keeping things stable, preventing decay, loss or change. Museum vitrines are designed create a kind of artificially endless present tense. Each glass-fronted case is a stopped watch. Everyone (even the Curator-Archaeologist) quickens their pace as they pass the fossils and the dodo, skip down the steps, and walk back out into the fresh air and the sunlight to resume the normal passage of time. A museum like the Pitt Rivers is more time capsule than time machine, built to bring objects to a standstill. Archaeology simply puts this capsule into reverse, focusing only on the detritus of the human past. So let’s get the old archaeological joke out of the way at the outset: The Future’s Not My Period.

“A museum like the Pitt Rivers is more time capsule than time machine, built to bring objects to a standstill. Archaeology simply puts this capsule into reverse”

This is not to say that Archaeologist-Curators never think about the future. In the history of the Pitt Rivers one example of such thinking springs immediately to mind, and it is one that came about just over half a century ago. In October 1964, the Pitt Rivers Museum appointed a new Curator (its third since 1891). Bernard Fagg, a distinguished archaeologist and curator, had been the Director of the National Museum in Nigeria, where he had rebuilt the museum. From the moment of his appointment Fagg began work on a plan for a new Pitt Rivers Museum. Patrons including the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the premiers of Ethiopia, Senegal and Malaysia were gathered. A decree authorizing the purchase of a new site in North Oxford from St John’s College was adopted by Congregation. And in 1966, a design for the new museum was commissioned from Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi and London architects Powell and Moya.

Nervi’s proposed concrete and glass rotunda was 92 metres in diameter, providing 28,400 square metres of interior space across four stories (two of which were underground). It brought together the full range of Archaeological and Anthropological activities of the University at one site: the collections of the Pitt Rivers and the Balfour Library, the Institute of Archaeology, the Institute of Social Anthropology, the Laboratories for Physical Anthropology, Environmental Archaeology, and the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. There would be three lecture rooms; a Centre for Musicology with a recording studio; a range of museum laboratories and workshops; a Photographic Department with darkroom, studio and print library; a suite of workrooms for post-excavation research; and a coffee bar and a restaurant.

“The plans to leave the Victorian building behind were unsuccessful for a number of reasons…protests from local residents, problems reaching the fundraising targets. But the project also suffered from a flawed vision of the future”

An enormous glass dome enclosed a special tropical and subtropical ‘Climatron’, inspired by the iconic domed planthouse built at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis in 1960. The circular galleries allowed for the anthropological and archaeological collections to be arranged both geographically (by circumference), and typologically or temporally (radially). The proposed museum would have looked quite in character among the buildings of Tracy Island – the secret South Pacific base of the International Rescue organisation in the children’s television programme Thunderbirds (first broadcast 1965).[i]

Fagg’s plans to leave the Victorian building behind were unsuccessful for a number of reasons. There were protests from the residents of Bradmore Road, and problems in reaching the fundraising targets. But the project also suffered from a flawed vision of the future. It was, to borrow a term coined by the composer Leonard B. Meyer, a ‘chronocentric’ plan.[ii]

Anthropological museums have often been charged with ethnocentrism, but Fagg’s archaeological chronocentrism was driven by his own immediate modern intellectual concerns. In Fagg’s vision of the future, temporal, geographical and typological arrangements were resolved in a single display regime, and the full range of archaeological and anthropological endeavour was brought together at a single location for the study of world culture, past and present. This finality of vision moved away from the spirit of Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ own more open-ended vision of the future of typological museums which, writing in 1891, he imagined ‘would require constant rearrangement’, to the extent that ‘the cases might, perhaps, be put on wheels to facilitate their readjustment’[iii].

How else might we think about the future of the Pitt Rivers Museum in fifty years time – a full century after Fagg’s unsuccessful scheme? We might start with thinking about the present day in a different way. Today we are living through a period of rapid technological changes comparable with those of Victorian Britain. The Victorian Museum Age, and the evolutionary thinking that accompanied it, was to a large extent a response to the technological and social changes – changes in transportation, empire, the measurement of time and space, urban form, and material culture.

The digital transformation of knowledge and culture is just getting underway, but there are already strong indications that it will bring in its wake a second Museum Age. The sheer numbers of museum visitors alone tell us much. To take some examples from the UK, during 2013-14 there were 6.7 million visitors to the British Museum and 6.4 million to the National Gallery. Oxford University’s four museums – the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, Oxford University Museum of Natural History and Museum of the History of Science – received more than 2.1 million visitors. As visitor numbers have grown, construction and expansion has transformed museums around the world. In 2013, reporting on the re-opening of the Rijkesmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the New York Times announced ‘a golden age of museum renovation’.[iv] In China, the 25 museums that existed in 1949 had grown to more than 3,500 by 2013. In the universities, interdisciplinary interest in museum collections and material culture is burgeoning. The economic and social impacts of museums are now widely recognised, from tourism to the quality of life and wellbeing that people gain from living alongside culture. Perhaps even the longstanding decline in individual giving to museums – the tradition of philanthropy to which the Pitt Rivers owes its beginning – may be starting very slowly to abate.

“Signs of a new Museum Age are clearest in digital culture. Billions of everyday curatorial acts are going on around us – you see people documenting, cataloguing and sharing what they see, where they are, who they are with, what they are thinking or feeling”

But signs of a new Museum Age are clearest in digital culture itself. The hundreds of millions of online visitors to museum websites and open access resources are one small part of this. Many more billions of everyday curatorial acts constantly going on around us. Walk through the centre of any historic city, or pause to observe museum visitors in the galleries, and you see people documenting, cataloguing and sharing what they see, where they are, who they are with, what they are thinking or feeling, through an ever-widening array of apps and devices. Some lament the second-handedness of visitor experience refracted through screens, but engagements with museum objects have always been mediated and mimetic. The screens of their devices simply develop new kinds of engagement with collections from older technologies – the glass case, the cast, the photograph.

In long-term perspective, Oxford University’s collections have developed over six centuries, punctuated roughly once every 200 years by new benefactions and institutions. The opening in 1488 of Duke Humfrey’s Library, housing the manuscripts donated by Humphrey of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Gloucester, was followed in 1683 by the benefaction of Elias Ashmole that formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum; and in 1884 by the donation of the Pitt Rivers collection. Each of these moments – 1480s, 1680, 1880s – was intimately related to new kinds of knowledge: Rennaissance, Empiricist, Evolutionary.

“Historic collections will no longer gather dust, and undoubtedly new forms of contemporary collecting will emerge. The Digital Museum Age will not diminish the museum as an institution, but will strengthen it by unlocking the cabinets”

Next, Digital. The Museum Age of the 19th century was focused on exhibitionary practices, where a curatorial vision presicely shaped what was selected and presented – an approach that continued into Fagg’s grand 1960s scheme. By AD 2065 a Digital Museum Age (DMA) will have unfolded those practices. Museums will remain public institutions, but digitalism will have transformed the public realm. Open methods will replace exhibitionary practices. DMA will happen not just in the galleries, but mainly in the storerooms. Connections between objects in different repositories, and with people, places and communities far beyond the museum, will be ignited and reignited. DMA will require us to build not new galleries, but new research centres where objects are freed from cardboard boxes and ziplock bags. DMA will serve to re-humanize museum objects. Historic collections will no longer gather dust, and undoubtedly new forms of contemporary collecting will emerge. DMA will not diminish the museum as an institution, but will strengthen it by unlocking the cabinets.

The first step in the process will be to recognise that museums are places not just for the display of information, but for the co-production of knowledge. Museums, in other words, are not just collections of objects, but always collections of ideas.

Dan Hicks, Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford, and Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum

[i] See discussions in Mike O’Hanlon’s recent book The Pitt Rivers Museum: a world within (2014, London: Scala) and Chiara Bleckenwegner’s 2014 essay ‘The Unbuilt Pitt Rivers Museum’ (typescript on file at the Pitt Rivers Museum).
[ii] Leonard B. Meyer 1967. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: patterns and predictions in twentieth-century culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chapter 7.
[iii] Augustus Pitt-Rivers 1891. Typological Museums, as exemplified by the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, and his provincial museum at Farnham, Dorset. Journal of the Society of Arts 40: 115-122.
[iv] New York Times 1 May 2013.

This essay was first published in the 2015 issue of Crossword – the magazine of St Cross College – and was written as part of the celebrations of the 50 year anniversary of St Cross College, Oxford. It can also be found on Dan Hicks’ blog: http://profdanhicks.blogspot.co.uk/

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About the author: Emmajane Avery is Director of Learning and Visitor Experience at the V&A. Emmajane has worked in museum education for 17 years and has particular interest in activities which develop practical design skills and inspire new generations of designers as well as community programmes which add to enjoyment and wellbeing. She was previously Curator: Schools and Teacher Programmes at Tate Modern, Head of Education at the Wallace Collection and Deputy Education Officer at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Emmajane studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, followed by an MA in Museology at the University of East Anglia

From its origins in the mid-19th century, the V&A has sought to be as open and accessible as possible. On its South Kensington site you can see one of the original entrances to the museum, now within the central courtyard garden. As you enter, what do you find? Not a gallery, but a café designed by William Morris and others in the first ever museum refreshment rooms. Above, via the original ceramics galleries, is an ornate Victorian lecture theatre. The idea was that you could feed your body, mind and spirit. This even extended to the evenings as the V&A was the first museum to install gas lighting so that it could open at a convenient time for working people to visit. The V&A Museum of Childhood opened in 1872 as the Bethnal Green Museum to bring awareness of Britain’s cultural heritage to the East End, with a similarly inclusive outlook.

This aim continues today, most recently with a trio of projects which have sought to bring the voices of our participants into the museum through co-creation and co-programming. These are CreateVoice (a youth collective), a Children’s Forum at the Museum of Childhood, and child-led family tours of the new Europe 1600-1815 galleries.

CreateVoice is a very active collective of young people aged 16-24 from diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds who support the V&A at South Kensington with its programming and activities for people from their age-group. This collective was borne out of a range of social inclusion projects which took place from 2007-2009. Today there are around 100 young people registered (and an extremely active group of about 25-30) which grew out of an initial a meeting in 2009 where six people who had attended one of the social inclusion projects were brought together to discuss ‘what makes a good event for young people?’. Now this group holds monthly CreateInsights (creative industries talks and workshops with curators, artists and others), quarterly meetings and studio visits, the creation of annual festivals such as Making It (a careers day about pathways into the creative industries), Create Tours of the museum by young people for young people and even off-site events and workshops at the Glastonbury Festival where they spread the word about the V&A and the welcome it can provide for people of their age.

While it is relatively common for museums to consult young people about their programmes and activities, it is less usual for primary school-age children to be asked their opinion in a sustained way. The V&A Museum of Childhood is, by its very nature, extremely popular with children, schools and families, with 130,000 participants in its learning programme in 2015-16 (against a total visitor figure of 450,000), most of whom are in the under 12s age-group. It was therefore felt to be hugely beneficial to the Museum to create a forum made up of children from this younger age-group.

“The aim was a dialogue with children, listening to them and enabling them to have a voice in the Museum, to ensure the collections remain relevant to their lives. Young people hold monthly workshops with curators and quarterly meetings and studio visits with the V&A’s Director”

The aims were, among others, to establish and maintain a dialogue with children, listening to them and enabling them to have a voice in the Museum, to ensure that the collections remain relevant to their lives and to identify and remove barriers to children’s access to the collections. Since January 2016, a group of Year 4 children from a local primary school have been working with an artist in residence to explore the physical and intellectual components of the museum through the theme of ‘play’. These children have attended the museum once a week over a period of ten weeks exploring the notion of ‘the Museum as playground’ and ‘the collection as narrative’. While the first phase of the project has only recently ended and so is still at an early stage, one of the most valuable activities so far has been giving these children a real sense of ownership of the Museum, credence to their opinions and treating them as ‘proper’ museum volunteers. They have all been issued with V&A Museum of Childhood volunteer passes, been introduced to staff and taken part in back-of-house tours, seen collections in store and begun to understand the workings of the museum, returning to school “full of energy and enthusiasm” according to their head teacher.

In December 2015 the V&A opened its Europe 1600-1815 galleries. These are a suite of seven galleries exploring the art, design and culture of Europe during a period which saw the rise of France as dominant arbiter of taste and elegance as well as global influences on European style. From the outset we wanted to understand how to make these galleries more appealing to children and families and therefore sought their opinions on the selection of objects and their interpretation. Even before the old galleries were deinstalled, a small group of families was taken around them by torch-light to explore the vault-like spaces and to investigate which objects were likely to appeal to their age-group. The children encountered a range of objects from the period, but were particularly drawn to such things as a creepy wax reliefs featuring rats and skeletons, a cabinet with a mirrored, ‘stage-set’ interior, an ornate mother-of-pearl stand and a strange sculpture of a bull with what looked like an exposed brain! They responded to to the objects using a ‘red, orange and blue’ sticker system where they scored the objects as red (‘red-hot and should definitely be displayed’), orange (‘interesting’) or blue (‘cold as ice’/not that appealing). Those with a red-hot rating were definitely to be included and at a height, where possible, where children could interact with them as easily as possible. Later we held workshops behind-the-scenes in the curatorial department looking at individual objects and posing questions about them with the children which might help with later interpretation for this audience. Label-writing workshops were also held and contributed to the creation of new family labels. Final versions of these are now in the galleries, denoted by a playful parrot symbol.

“We wanted to understand how to make these galleries more appealing to children and families and sought their opinions on objects and interpretation. Eight families with children aged 5 to 12 were recruited to devise and deliver tours in the newly-created galleries”

Lastly, came the recruitment of a group of families to devise and deliver tours for other families in the newly-created galleries. Eight families with children aged 5 to 12 were trained to be volunteer tour guides. The training involved sessions with a storyteller on how to create an engaging story as well as a workshop and Q&A with experienced V&A guides on presentation and guiding techniques. Later the curators led sessions looking at the new displays and their installation, including practical insights such as how heavy it was to move and install certain pieces! Then the children chose their favourite objects and devised inventive, fascinating and personal tours for other families to enjoy. These tours were given during the February 2016 half term, when we staged a variety of family activities themed around the Europe galleries, and were listed as part of the V&A public programme. The response from the public and the ‘performing’ families alike was amazing. An average of thirty people attended each tour and children were genuinely fascinated to be led by other children. Other important outcomes were how the children developed in confidence throughout the programme. Comments included: “it is amazing to stop and think that an 8 and a 10 yr old wrote and delivered a 20 minute talk by themselves for a large group of strangers”, “I could hang on to their enthusiasm all day!” and “I am extremely proud of what they have achieved in confidence, eloquence and determination”.

Through each of these projects we have sought to bring benefit to those involved, by giving them a voice within the Museum, offering enjoyment and new skills and, particularly in the case of CreateVoice, experience which should give greater employability prospects. The public have gained through having activities devised by those who know first-hand what would appeal to these audiences and the museums have gained hugely from putting children’s and young people’s voices at the heart of our programming.

Emmajane Avery
Director of Learning and Visitor Experience,
Victoria and Albert Museum

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Museum Ideas 2019, London – Call for Papers

Speak at the eighth edition of Museum Ideas – the annual international conference exploring the ideas shaping the future of museums. Key themes include social impact, activism, collaborative working, co-curation, and participatory practice.

Each year Museum Ideas brings together a group of fascinating speakers and challenges them to share innovative ideas in concise, powerful talks.The aim is for delegates to be inspired by perspectives outside their own specialism and locality. What unites the conference is the quality and enthusiasm of contributors along with their desire to share valuable expertise and experience.

With a progressive attitude and international approach, Museum Ideas is committed to sharing innovative ideas in museums globally. We are now inviting expressions of interest and proposals for Museum Ideas 2019 and are looking to share pioneering ideas that help spark transformative change.

Interested in speaking at Museum Ideas 2019? Please contact Gregory Chamberlain – greg@museum-id.com.

Your proposal should include the following information:

• A working title and synopsis – at this stage a brief paragraph is fine
• Your name, job title and organisation

The deadline for proposals is Thursday 31 January 2019.

Speakers at previous editions of the Museum Ideas have included: Chris Michaels, Digital Director, The National Gallery, London; Sree Sreenivasan, Chief Digital Officer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Manal Ataya, Director General, Sharjah Museums, UAE; Bonita Bennett, Director, District Six Museum, Cape Town; Whitney Donhauser, Director, Museum of the City of New York; Robert Stein, Deputy Director, Dallas Museum of Art; Kaywin Feldman, Director and President of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Mark Miller, Convenor Young People’s Programmes, Tate Modern and Tate Britain; Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, Director of Interpretation, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Rose Hiscock, Director, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, Sydney; Synthia Griffin, Curator: Regeneration & Community Partnerships, Tate Modern; Seb Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Media, Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt; Elizabeth Cotton, Head of Human History, Auckland War Memorial Museum; Andrew Lewis, Data and Insights Architect, Natural History Museum; Jonas Heide Smith, Head of Digital, SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark; Francesca Rosenberg, Director of Community and Access Programs, MoMA; Hadrian Ellory-van Dekker, Head of Collections, Science Museum, London; Peter Gorgels, Digital Communication Manager, Rijksmuseum; Pille Runnel, Research Director, Estonian National Museum; Kirsten Jensen, Audience Development Manager, Trapholt Museum, Denmark; JiaJia Fei, Director of Digital, Jewish Museum, New York; Ken Arnold, Creative Director, Medical Museion, Copenhagen; Gravity Goldberg, Associate Director of Public Programs, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Dan Hicks, Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford; Jane Burton, Head of Content and Creative Director, Tate Media; Caryn Boehm, Creative Engagement Producer, Peabody Essex Museum; and Elizabeth Galvin, Leader, Digital Programmes Team, V&A.

“A conference for mind expanding conversations and international networking with a platform for shared discussions” – Martin Payne, The British Museum

Book Now – Early-Bird Registration Open
Register for Museum Ideas 2019 – with fresh insights you can take directly back to your team, the events will add tremendous value to your current work and are an active investment in the future and what you choose to do next. Super early-bird tickets start at £97.

Find out more about the 2019 events, speakers and venues

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Linda Duke on the need for museums – art museums, certainly, but other kinds of museums as well – to be clear about the role they play in providing and raising consciousness of aesthetic experience for the public. Aesthetic experiences are important opportunities for knowing the complex and often ambiguous world in which we live.

About the author: Linda Duke is Director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University. Between 2003-2011 Linda was Director of Engagement at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and prior to that Director of Education at UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Linda is interested in better understanding the role of aesthetic experience in learning, development, and the quality of human life. She sees art museums as important sites for exploring these matters, in partnership with universities, schools, and community groups.

In this essay I’d like to bring together some ideas, observations, and realizations that have been churning in my mind with ever greater urgency during the years I have worked as an art museum educator. This cluster of ideas has implications for many of the tasks museum educators perform on a daily basis: planning gallery programs, talks, performances, and art-making activities; editing labels and advising on installation designs; and developing evaluation tools to assess the effectiveness of all of these. My essential thesis regards the nature and significance of “aesthetic experience” and “aesthetic thought,” and the need for museums – art museums, certainly, but other kinds of museums as well – to be clear about the role they play in providing and raising consciousness of aesthetic experience for the public. By “public” I mean schools and teachers, but also families and life-long learners of any age. The urgency of this effort to speak clearly about the nature and value of aesthetic thought and experience is derived from the challenge it offers to the hegemony of received verbal information in our schools and in mainstream American culture more broadly. Readers more familiar with these matters in other English-speaking countries can judge for themselves the relevance of my views to those societies.

Many public educational systems in the United States have eroded basic human capabilities to learn and know in non-verbal ways. This erosion has been effected in part by explicitly mistrusting and diminishing the value of learning and knowing non-verbally, and in part by simply ignoring such knowledge in favor of indexical verbal information. The overwhelming bias toward received information has been devastating for children and learners of all ages whose talents lie elsewhere, and the squandering of their talents by society has been society’s loss. The bias has implications that extend beyond innate learning styles to matters of cultural diversity. Some cultures accord more importance and recognition to embodied knowledge domains such as skillful movement or an acute refinement of the sense of hearing or vision, for example.(1) This criticism of mainstream education should not be interpreted to imply that verbal information is unimportant or less important in the learning process than other ways of describing and exploring the world. I will argue here that the development of a vigorous, on-going connection between verbal and experiential knowledge is characteristic of confident critical thinking and creative living.

The role of museums
Museums have a unique role to play in correcting the imbalance in current ideas about learning, understanding, and knowing because their collections provide especially rich opportunities for connecting experiences with language. Museums should be places where people are encouraged to learn from and reflect upon encounters with material objects – natural objects and those shaped by human intention. Museums hold and display these objects, and their curators and educators are attuned to helping people look at and think carefully about them. Museums do these things, but I suggest that they need to do them more assertively and confidently, and that they not be shamed and pressured to become more information-centric, or to adopt “learning objectives” indistinguishable from those embraced by many schools. Museums should lead efforts to demonstrate the importance of linking experiential and object-based learning with language. Museums can provide optimal arenas for developing a conscious and fluent exchange between material experience and language. Museums are certainly not the only places to have aesthetic experiences, but they can be places where such experiences are explored and made explicit.

“Museums have a unique role to play in correcting the imbalance in current ideas about learning, understanding, and knowing because their collections provide especially rich opportunities for connecting experiences with language”

As a veteran art museum educator, I have come to consider “aesthetic” those experiences and meaning-seeking thought processes that allow humans to embrace complex, dense, and ambiguous data sets, both sensory and verbal. I recognize that my definition steps beyond traditional ones that involve standards of beauty. It intentionally opens the range of aesthetic experience to include forays into domains such as science and history, and also the most ordinary transactions of daily life, such as gardening, cooking and enjoying food. Aesthetic experiences invariably have sensory components; they are embodied experiences that at times provide insight and inspire wonder. Museums must find new ways to document and assess the public value of aesthetic experience because it is key to the kind of learning that goes on in their galleries and programs. In the current educational culture of high-stakes, standardized, multiple-choice tests, this learning remains undervalued and even unrecognized. In the parlance of identity marketing, the term “aesthetic” itself has an image problem.

Aesthetic experience as embodied experience
During the fall of 2009, I was fortunate to be able to spend a few weeks in residence at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Equipped with a digital voice recorder, I interviewed a number of the Academy’s current residents and staff members, extraordinary people all. Interviewees included Rome Prize-winning visual artists, musicians, and scholars, as well as gardeners, chefs and culinary apprentices. I asked them each to describe or muse upon a recent “aesthetic experience.” I suggested that they should feel free to apply that term as they saw fit and I got some interesting responses. Experiences with architecture and with the layered complexity of the city of Rome itself came up most frequently in conversations with the full range of community members. In all cases, the aesthetic nature of the experience was multi-faceted. The forms, scale, and décor of buildings and ruins were described; but the aesthetic experience often including music or other sounds, scents, qualities of light, the gestures of people, and very often connections with history or literature known to the speaker. Of course people also spoke about encounters with paintings or sculptures. However, experiences with food and drink almost rivaled architecture in the number and intensity of descriptions. Metaphor and symbolism played roles in describing the richness of interviewees’ encounters with food. The Academy’s executive chef described the joy of picking apples with sunlight streaming through the leaves. She delighted in the pentagram of seeds seen when an apple is sliced cross-wise, and connected this with a basic form in Roman architecture. People directly involved with the Academy’s innovative Alice Waters-inspired food program(2) were by no means the only ones who had aesthetic experiences with food. Art historians and scholars of antiquities described nuanced experiences with bean soup and hot chocolate.(3)

In most of these conversations, it was clear that what people called “aesthetic experiences” were never simple, even if they appeared so before being “unpacked.” They were multi-sensory(4) even when the primary catalyst was mono-sensory. Visual experiences, for example, often required likening to or evoked memories of other senses. Descriptions required back-tracking and supplemental additions to round out the telling of them. These were experiences that at moments challenged their narrators to find appropriate words, and were not easily conveyed in a simple sentence.(5) Given that the subjunctive isn’t used as much these days as in past times, even the requisite grammar was challenging. Phrases such as “almost as if it were….” became necessary.

In each case people seemed to consider the effort worthwhile and most of the interviews, even the very short ones, were curiously moving experiences – certainly for me, and I believe for the interviewees as well. I had invited people to talk about something that would ordinarily be unvoiced and, because unvoiced, also undervalued.

An intriguing relationship between high ability and what is typically considered disability emerged in several interviews. In other words, people sometimes used a term associated with abnormality to describe an aesthetic experience. During the interviews several of the artists referenced synesthesia – the experience of sensory chords being struck, such as sensing colors or other visual effects while listening to music. Even without using the term synesthesia, people resorted to vocabulary related to other senses in describing an effect of the visual. Artists also shared personal experiences with dyslexia or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in their younger years and reflected on the ways their highly visual and sensory modes of knowing the world had at times put them at a disadvantage (in rigidly structured schools), and at other times allowed them to accomplish complex feats. One painter spoke at length about the condensed meanings he finds in “simple” geometric shapes and their relationships. This interview became a recounting of what I would term intense “aesthetic research” by him over a period of many years. Not that this work was unrelated to standard scholarship and written history, both of which were important to him; but it was driven by visual aesthetic insights. More than one artist, each in his or her own hard-found words, talked about art as material and sensory philosophy – about making as a kind of thinking, about the ability of material “things” to embody knowledge.(6)

Thinking about thinking
Listening to the people I interviewed at the Academy seemed to confirm a hunch I’ve had for some time: some of us are more inclined to think in words, others not so much. I remember the gratitude I felt when I first encountered the writings of both Temple Grandin(7) and Ron Davis(8) on visual and non-verbal thinking. Personally, I am not conscious of thinking in words most of the time. I can think with words if, for example, I am planning how to say something; but ordinarily I have no sense of thoughts being words. In fact, I am sometimes conscious of the effort entailed by bringing complex ideas to language. That process can feel as frustrating as attempting to describe a dream that seems to slip away just as one strives to recall it. Perhaps most of us have the ability to think both ways, but a tendency that goes to one or the other.

“Looking, thinking, wondering, and discussion, when skillfully supported, can provide challenge and pleasure for museum visitors”

In writing about the visual thinking that she and other autistic people experience, Temple Grandin has advocated intensive work on language for autistic children. She credits that effort during her own childhood with the ability she has found to express her keen intelligence in her work. In her case, one might say the strong interface between non-verbal thought and language has made the difference between serious disability and high-level function – even genius. Ron Davis has argued convincingly that so-called visual thinking is so much faster than verbal thought that many people are not conscious of images. These are the people, he says, who are unable to easily describe how they think. As for non-autistic people, neither writer assumes that being a non-verbal thinker necessarily connotes a lack of skill with language or a lesser affection for it. When the interface between non-verbal thought and language is highly functional, creative language usages and highly evocative descriptive abilities can be enhanced. I suggest that it can be equally empowering for intensely verbal thinkers to cultivate greater awareness of and connection with visual and other sensory input. Looking, thinking, wondering, and discussion, when skillfully supported, can provide challenge and pleasure for museum visitors of many persuasions.(9) There is already some evidence that well-designed experiences in museums can be growth-inducing for a wide range of children.(10)

The Embodied Mind at Work and Play: Museums as Mental Gymnasiums
I like to use the phrase “mental gymnasium” to evoke the kind of exhilarating activity I believe museums can provide. In using this term I don’t intend the kind of frenetic activity some museums encourage, especially for children and as part of a widespread contemporary dread of “boredom.” The abilities to look carefully, reflect and wonder, or to be fully present in the moment, are neither fostered nor acknowledged when fast-paced stimulation and superficial interactivity are the priorities of museum installation design. Issues of technology and interactivity are especially tricky in art museum galleries, where looking, thinking, discussing, reconsidering, etc. ARE the interactive experiences most works of art invite. This is not to say that informative videos or handheld gallery tour experiences are not valuable. However, care must be taken to avoid pitting the work of art against these inherently compelling technologies. Works of art require our attention and effort. Their “voices” cannot be replaced by explanation without avoiding the aesthetic experience itself. A handheld can offer thoughtful and provocative information about the object or its maker. This information is not the same as each visitor’s encounter with its presence and may, at times, lessen the chances a visitor will have that encounter. In general, information about a work of art can enrich, but is not and does not provide aesthetic experience.(11)

“I like to use the phrase “mental gymnasium” to evoke the kind of exhilarating activity I believe museums can provide”

Museums can play a role in articulating the value of aesthetic experience, broadly defined and existing largely outside the tame and logical structures of ordinary verbal language – poetic and other artistic uses of language excepted. Museums can and should offer visitors opportunities to develop non-verbal skills as well as the wonderfully empowering ability to join experience with language in programs that foster discussion and description. They should offer these to the public as life-long learning opportunities, and to students in partnership with schools as a balance and corrective to the overwhelming emphasis on received verbal information. New kinds of assessments must be developed to define aesthetic experience as public value, so that museums can become adept at documenting and advocating the embodied, sensory-intellectual nature of their work.

Aesthetic experiences are not effete or irrelevant, but are instead important opportunities for knowing the complex and often ambiguous world in which we live. Perhaps one might say we think aesthetically when the data set is so complex and some aspects of it so ambiguous that more linear, simply logical ways of thinking alone cannot do the job. When logical steps have discovered seemingly insurmountable contradiction, an aesthetic insight is one that offers a new and expanded frame of reference. This is creativity and discovery; it can and should happen in museums.

Linda Duke
Director, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University

(prior Director of Engagement, Indianapolis Museum of Art)

In memory of landscape architect Ed Blake

Notes | References | Bibliography

1. Brenda Farnell is an anthropologist and expert on non-verbal knowledge traditions in Native American cultures. She is the author of Do You See What I Mean?: Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action (1995, paperback 2009). Speaking with Farnell years ago at the University of Illinois, and reading her papers, first directed my attention to the ways bodily knowledge is marginalized in contemporary American culture. Francisco Varela, the late Chilean neuroscientist and philosopher of science, published The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (co-authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch) in 1991. Discovering this book in the late ‘90s was pivotal for my own nascent thinking about learning, consciousness and experience.

2. In 2007, chef and local food advocate Alice Waters began helping the Academy revamp its approach to food. She created the Rome Sustainable Food Project to build a network of local farmers practicing sustainable agriculture and animal husbandry, artisan cheese makers, and others. She chose executive chef Mona Talbott and chef Chris Boswell to head the Academy kitchen and oversee an ever-changing roster of interns from various culinary schools. The dining table once again became the warm heart of the institution, with delicious meals prepared from honest ingredients that invite members of the Academy community to gather and linger for conversation across disciplines. http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13758

3. Excerpt from Oct. 19, 2009 interview with art historian Lauren Kinnee: I am going to talk about my aesthetic experiences with food here, beginning with today’s lunch – in particular, the beans. I feel a little bit like when I talk about food… Food is something that I’m very interested in but it’s a different sort of aesthetic experience from what I’m used to with visual aesthetics. And sometimes I feel like words fail me, but I am not willing to let them fail me because talking about this stuff is what I do, in aesthetic terms. So let’s see what we can get. I think the key to the bean dish today was the contrast in texture between the sort of smooth and creamy beans which were… I mean, with the bean is some sort of a grain to it, especially if you are cooking from dried beans. As you bite into it, you can sense different gradations of that. But in these, it was so perfectly cooked that there was no gradient or real texture. It really had this consistent smoothness to it…… There was like a balance going there in terms of not just texture, but you have that kind of mellow – almost a nuttiness to the sort of mellow buttery, nutty bean flavor. And the same thing with the bread which is another mellow flavor, contrasted with the sharpness and bitterness and acidity of the tomato and the chard, …. so it’s like the entire dish is about contrasts. It was fun.

4. Excerpt from Oct. 19, 2009, interview with art historian Susanna McFadden: …. the Pantheon, which is one of those emblematic places in Rome and of Rome, is actually still a working church. And I think that was the first time I consciously realized that fact. We went to the Pentecost services there, and at the end of those services, rose petals were thrown down through the oculus of the church/Pantheon. And this was the most spiritual experience I ever had because of the visualness of it. That vision of rose petals floating down, and the sunlit beam through the oculus onto the congregation below was about the closest thing I’d ever had to an encounter with some aspect of the Divine. And the fact that it was in the Pantheon, which itself is the one of the most beautiful buildings ever constructed and, once experienced, it was an aesthetic experience of the space itself …. In my mind, that has always been tied to an emotion that I feel was almost inevitable and indescribable when I entered that space. It’s palpably sacred. And to me, when I say sacred, I don’t mean Catholic or pagan or whatever. It’s just that there is something about that space, and so that added experience of the blood red roses that were sort of floating down was unbelievable. And then, to make it even crazier, at the end of the service, the clergy walks out of the space along a red carpet that’s cordoned off on either side. And somehow, because of the crowd, I got pushed up against one of the cordons. And I don’t know if it was a cardinal or a bishop, but one of the clergy walks by me. He reaches his hand up and plucks a rose petal out of the air and caresses my cheek with it, and then hands me the petal. And that… again, that moment of sort of tactile convergence between Catholicism and sacred space and just the surreal experience of it all happening within this great pagan building was something I will never forget. And I think it also hit home that I loved Rome, and I had to be there.

5. Albert Rothenberg is a psychiatrist and long-time member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School who has written extensively on the nature of creativity. His book Creativity and Madness (1990) is based on interviews with dozens of writers, artists, scientists, and poets. Rothenberg proposed two basic qualities of creative thought that are common to science and the arts. The first he called janusian processes or janus thinking. It involves the accommodation of paradox and contradiction, and often leads to insights that transcend the perceived incompatibility of a given set of facts. The second he called homospacial thinking; it is characterized by the ability to imagine two separate actions or objects located in the same time and place. Rothenberg’s ideas prompt immediate associations with both theoretical physics and the arts.

6. Excerpt from interview Oct. 12, 2009, with artist Stephen Westfall: I think that painters are art historians, and in fact, it’s been very important to me to assert that art is a form of material philosophy. Excerpt from interview Oct. 23, 2009 with artist Terry Adkins: So I guess just there’s a mystical union between the maker and the made thing. It doesn’t allow me to then back off and call anything I make an object. It is either a work of art or it is not. And I believe that “object,” even though it’s a Hussserlian term and all this, is a big misnomer. I mean, I think it’s come through slothful use to mean anything that’s not a painting in fine art. And I don’t believe that it is a proper description. There’s no way that having this union with this thing, I could then step back and have the subject/object, dichotomous relationship with it. I am still becoming as it becomes. Excerpt from same interview with Adkins: Terry: Well, I think today [information] is almost like lead. I think that the quantification of information that is not transformed by virtue of experience into knowledge just becomes a whole bundle of more stuff. / Linda: I was talking with Jon Calame the other night and we were calling that intellectual materialism. / Terry: OK, yeah. I would agree, it has the potential to be something. But until knowledge is acquired, it’s not amassed. It’s acquired through experience. So yeah, intellectual materialism is a good way to describe this glut of things.

7. Temple Grandin is an autistic woman and one of the most respected animal scientists of our time. She is the author of many professional articles and several books for general readers, including Thinking in Pictures (1996), Animals in Translation (2006), and Animals Make Us Human (2010). Grandin’s articulation of her experience as a highly intelligent non-verbal thinker has perhaps done more than the work of any other public figure to bring attention to the diversity of human thought processes.

8. Ron Davis is a dyslexic man whose extraordinary insights into this condition, so prevalent among readers of languages with alphabetic writing systems, led him to discover that its true nature is not so much disability as a learning difference associated quite frequently with giftedness. He has written The Gift of Dyslexia (1997) and The Gift of Learning (2003).

9. Abigail Housen is a cognitive psychologist whose research on aesthetic thinking led her to propose a developmental model for growth in the capacity to find meaning in art. In partnership with her long-time colleague Philip Yenawine, she has developed thoughtful, discussion-based teaching strategies (Visual Thinking Strategies or VTS, www.vtshome.org) that support natural growth and the development of a range of skills that are not addressed in information-based instruction. VTS is used in art museum galleries and in schools as an image curriculum and professional development program for teachers.

10. For links to PDF’s on several studies of VTS in museum-school partnerships see: http://vtshome.org/pages/major-findings

11. It must be acknowledged that some artists are very interested in the ways people interact with information and have arguably made these interactions into aesthetic experiences. David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles is an example of a place where intense research driven by aesthetic concerns is delivered to the public in ways that maintain absolute allegiance to those concerns.

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Articles published in issue 21:

Future Museum: Cabinet of Curiosity Reboot for the 21st Century
Tonya Nelson – Head of Museums and Collections at University College London – on how museums of the future can use digital technology to reach a public with an appetite for knowledge and information, and a real craving for social, political and economic change

Future Museum: Finding New Perspectives and Relevance
Ros Croker – Endeavour Learning Project Manager at the National Maritime Museum – on how museums of the future will have to listen better to their audiences, be open to challenge and change, and become better conversationalists and collaborators

Future Museum: Generating Debate and Offering Paths Forward
Whitney Donhauser – Director and President of the Museum of the City of New York – on how museums can generate discussion and debate about the present and future of our society and offer paths forward based on innovative local and global solutions

Collecting and Displaying a Refugee’s Life Jacket
Bryan Sitch – Curator of Archaeology and Deputy Head of Collections at Manchester Museum – on why collecting and displaying a refugee’s life jacket helps promote understanding between different cultures and how it is part of a project to reinvigorate collecting

Activism, Homelessness and a New Kind of Museum
Jess Turtle and Matt Turtle – co-founders of the UK’s first Museum of Homelessness – on developing a museum on the basis of a social need rather than to preserve an inherited collection of objects

The Museum as Host in a Polarised World
Tony Butler – Executive Director of Derby Museums Trust and Founder of the Happy Museum Project – on why museums must use their unique qualities to bridge divisions and become conveners in a contested world

Should Museums Have a Personality?
Russell Dornan – Digital Producer at V&A Museum of Design Dundee and until recently Web Editor for Wellcome Collection – on why tone and voice are crucial online and what it means to funnel a museum’s online presence through a unique filter: ourselves

Everything Anywhere: Welcome to Your New Life as a Platform
Jonas Heide Smith – Head of Digital at SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark – on why museums need to be more reductionist yet more disorganized in order to succeed in the digital world

The Stories We Tell and the Right to Remember
Bonita Bennett – Director of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa – on how the museum can be a place of healing and hope, of restitution, celebration, and the re-energising of resilience

The Migration Museum Project
Emily Miller – Head of Learning and Partnerships at the Migration Museum Project – on establishing a national cultural institution exploring the role that migration has played in shaping the UK

Habemus. Let´s Hack the Museums
Christian Diaz – coordinator of HABEMUS – a volunteer project of the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, Argentina – on how a radio programme jointly constructed with listeners is helping to create new connections with the public

Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights
Catherine O’Donnell – Programme Manager at the People’s History Museum in Manchester – on telling the stories of diverse lived experience and embedding co-production within their core strategic work

#ArchiveLottery: Randomly Opening Up Archaeology
Adam Corsini – Archaeology Collections Manager at the Museum of London – on using social media to open up collections and challenge staff to find new methods of engagement

Projects featured in issue 21:

V&A Exhibition Road Quarter
The V&A’s largest architectural intervention in over 100 years creates a dramatic new entrance and vast new gallery space

Frost Science
Frost Science in Miami combines planetarium, aquarium and museum to create a sophisticated science and technology campus

National Army Museum
Transformation of National Army Museum aims to focus on public engagement and giving visitors the opportunity to voice their opinions

Musée d’arts de Nantes 
Extension and transformation of the Musée d’arts de Nantes creates an exquisite and welcoming contemporary space

The Garden Museum
Cleverly housed within the church of St Mary’s-at-Lambeth, the Garden Museum re-opens after £7.5 million re-development project

Art Fund Museum of the Year 
Winner and finalists of the £100,000 Museum of the Year – the largest arts award in Britain and the biggest museum prize in the world

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The project managers employed all have experience on arts and heritage projects with the company drawing clients from the public and private sector. We identified that Clients in this field required a high degree of personal contact and as such we aim to tailor our service to suit individual client specific needs.

In 2003 we were appointed by Arts Council England as one of their few designated Project Monitoring companies and in 2008 as Heritage Lottery Fund Monitors.

Our field of expertise includes visual and performing arts projects, heritage projects (restoration and adaptation of listed buildings, buildings of national importance and Scheduled Ancient Monuments), multi funded projects including ACE and HLF, SRB / SEEDA and private fundraising / sponsorships, Local Authority led projects, privately funded and contracted projects, interaction with Charitable Trusts and similar organisations.

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Recent Project: The Holburne Museum of Art

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The work comprised of full renovation and restoration of the 18th century Grade 1 listed building, including the relocation of the grand Blomfield staircase.  A new glass and ceramic extension was built and linked to the existing museum providing café and exhibition space.

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Project value: £11m

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Established for over 45 years our flexible storage solutions provide optimum protection, easy access and maximum display potential. Our product range includes drawer cabinets, plan chests, shelving & cupboard systems, photographic & negative storage, picture racking, mobile bases, air-tight entomology and herbarium cabinets, visual browser and displays units, transportation systems, firearms racking and bespoke manufacture. We offer a no-obligation survey and quotation service with 2D/3D drawing services.

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