Help Crowdsource the Future of Museums!

We want your contributions to a forecast of the future of museums, written collectively by museum practitioners. Last fall, players in the game Superstruct began to draft "Museums and Society 2019"--a fictional report summarizing the state of museums in the future. CFM is still building the content of this report and we encourage you to help fill in the blanks. You can download a PDF and email comments and additions to futureofmuseums@aam-us.org, or edit the wiki document directly. You can explore the Institute for the Future's 10 Year Forecast based on the game results.

The 2019 report is an interesting contrast to the somewhat more conservative, real-world report prepared for CFM by Reach Advisors, "Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures."

• The Reach Advisors report was written by a small team looking at trends that started twenty-five years ago, and projecting these twenty-five years into the future.

• The 2019 report is based on scenarios created for the Superstruct game by professional futurists at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). They chose to emphasize the darker and hopefully less probable end of the spectrum, but their projections are still based on real-world data and academic forecasting methodologies.

Superstruct,  the online forecasting game created by the Institute for the Future (IFTF), concluded its official run on November 17. This first ever massive multiplay online forecasting game presented plausible, though alarming, projections of "superthreats" to human survival in the year 2019, and challenged players to respond. Participants created over 1000 stories about the future, based on IFTF scenarios, as well as 500 strategy forums and 500 fictional organizations (including museums!) The game site is still open--you can visit www.superstructgame.org to peruse these stories and projects, and add your own.

Over 6,800 people registered as participants, the Superstruct web site had 50,000 readers and information about the game content reached an estimated 3 million people. A word cloud of the game content reveals that "museum" and "museums" were two of the most frequent terms used in the stories, projects and news items generated in the game--museums are vital to helping the world navigate superthreats such as those envisioned by IFTF in the game!

UPDATE, November 4: News reports from the future are being posted to the Superstruct game site. To read the latest on museums in 2019, go to www.superstructgame.org, select "Explore the World of 2019" at the top of the main page, then select the “Tell a Story” tab and search on “museum” in the search box at the bottom left hand corner of the stories page. Add your own stories from the future! What will be happening at your museum?

This week's highlights:

The Distributed Museum

Mortati documents the growing trend for large museums to set up satellite locations around their metropolitan areas. “Local or community museums, having spent the last six years embracing the social web and building partnerships with large institutions” she reports, “are uniquely positioned to meet the needs of their communities and have a much smaller environmental footprint.” To read more, search on the Superstruct story page for "distributed museum."

 

Limits on Assembly

The World Health Organization (WHO) and Respiratory Distress Syndrome Relief (ReDSR) issued an urgent joint recommendation that in ReDS zones all social gatherings and public assembly should be limited to group sizes of 12 or fewer. Relevant venues include all workplaces, churches, restaurants, movie theaters, sporting venues and museums. To read more, search on the Superstruct story page for "social gatherings."

Superstruct, the online forecasting game from the Institute for the Future (IFTF) has launched, and the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) established museum-specific working groups (superstructs) on the game site.

Superstruct is an experiment in crowd sourcing—trying to help solve real-world problems by harnessing the collective wisdom of participants by creating a collaborative, open-source simulation of a possible future. For the six weeks of the game, participants will use forums, blogs, videos, wikis and other online applications to chronicle the world of 2019 and imagine how we might solve the challenge society will face.

CFM has generated eight museum specific scenarios within the game, building on the IFTF forecasts. Each topic has an associated wiki to capture your input and refine the game scenario. At the end of the game these wikis will become Museums and Society 2019: a Report from the Future, the first in an ongoing series of futures planning exercises.

The CFM superstructs posted on the game site are:

• Saving our Heritage 2019: How can museums preserve collections in an increasingly unstable world?
• Museum Survivor: How do we prepare for a future in which many museums have closed, merged or had to relocate from abandoned areas?
• Who’s Paying the Bills?: In 2019, where will we find the money that will enable us to continue serving our communities?
• Who Turned the Lights Out?: Our community is already beginning to “go green,” but the Superstruct scenarios challenge us to improve our progress by an order of magnitude.
• Good Grief! Maintaining public trust in online content: Tackling challenges of maintaining public trust in an era of cybervandalism.
• Don’t Let ReDS Make You Uncultured: How would museums cope with pandemic outbreaks of disease?
• All Hands on Deck: Where will our staff and volunteers come from?
• New Audiences in a Changing World: How can museums help communities cope with an influx of political, environmental and economic refugees?

Pick your topic, join one or more working groups and help tackle these challenges!

Read these instructions to get started.