Research Roundup
January 12, 2010

Tools for the future
The near future
Social trends, etc.
Other articles, essays, and recent items of interest
Refresh and reflect


Tools for the future:
  1. Best job title ever: Historian of the Future. In this profile, futurist James Bellini explains how futurists combine facts and "informed imagination."
  2. Trying to make sense of climate change and the potential impact on your region? Climate 1-Stop provides "a single location to share and access climate change tools, resources and information, with a primary focus on adaptation in developing countries. The Climate 1-Stop is a partnership of southern and northern organizations working at all levels [including the National Science Foundation, United Nations, World Resources Institute  and Resources for the Future], from grass roots to global." Works well in conjunction with the first item under other articles below. Another useful resource is the Energy Future Coalition.
  3. The Art of the Future blog is devoted to strategic planning and futurism. In a recent post entitled Critical Uncertainties: Pivot Points for the Future they discuss the futurist tool known as Structural Dynamics, "an approach to considering the future that doesn't claim to know what's coming but can help us identify what we need to be thinking about. It does this by identifying critical uncertainties that could go in any direction, and, by doing so, set the future on a course."

The near future:
  1. International Symposium on the future of Museum Climate seen in the context of Global Climate Change, scheduled to take place Monday, March 1, 2010, at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.
    "Internationally renowned speakers will address some of the questions which are inherent to the climate challenges: Can we gather the museum field nationally and/or internationally around new acceptable climate requirements for exhibition galleries and storage? How can we create exhibitions and expose our common cultural heritage in a sustainable way which is also acceptable for future generations? How can museums be run in a more CO2 neutral way while simultaneously guaranteeing an adequate indoor climate? Can we envision Green Museums as role-models for society? And lastly, how does a global movement such as Cradle-to-Cradle see the function of the museum as keepers of the past and torches for the future?"
    For details about the program and registration, see http://www.smk.dk/smk.nsf/docs/b2ce846074efe4a4c12576a3005dba64.
  2. Top scientists share their future predictions with the Sunday Times in London. In short, "just another decade of future shock."
  3. The question used to be "are museums, libraries and archives becoming more alike?" Now it's "how quickly are they converging?" For some of the latest think on convergence, watch this recent presentation to the OCLC Global Council by Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway (audio plus slides): http://www.oclc.org/us/en/councils/global/presentations/default.htm. A nice summary of two years of investigation and thinking on convergence by some of the leading practitioners.
  4. How has the current recession affected Americans? According to some scholars, younger Americans (18 to 25) are being scarred for life: "After living through one of the most brutal recessions in U.S. history, many late teens and young adults could be scarred for life, adopting behaviors that could skew everything from their own careers to politics, corporate profits and the stock market. Academics are beginning to study the implications of the recent recession on the current generation of Americans that age, suggesting it may have much the same effect as how the Great Depression changed so many of the youth of the 1930s into conservative spenders and investors."
  5. Fundraising Without Checks. The decline of checks — i.e., those slips of paper that people have used for centuries to transfer money — is having an impact on charitable fundraising. Exactly what impact is still hard to tell, as this blog post from The Agitator, a social marketers' website, shows.  (Note that the U.K.. has already announced plans to phase out all checks by 2018 while "checks are dying a natural death in the U.S." See http://bankingblog.celent.com/?p=1151.)

Social trends, etc.:
  1. Every day, Americans consume an astonishing 3.6 zettabytes of data, the equivalent of 16 average-sized hard drives for every man, woman, and child among us. Click here for a graphic representation of where the stuff comes from and some discussion of what our insatiable appetite for bandwidth means. (Spotted on Fast Company.)
  2. Social media makes good business, bad workers, at least according to a recent survey by California-based Robert Half Technology (as reported in the San Francisco Examiner): "Businesses are increasingly using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for marketing purposes, but those same companies don't want employees logging on during work hours."
  3. The number and size of "mega-gifts" (charitable donations of a million dollars or more) fell in 2009. "The ten biggest gifts donated by Americans in 2009 totaled $2.7 billion, down from $8 billion in 2008 and more than $4 billion in 2007, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. In all, seven gifts of $100 million or more were made last year — a significant falloff from 2008, when at least fifteen philanthropists announced gifts of that size." (Via the Philanthropy News Digest.) For museums, the biggest gift on the list was $66.1 million to the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand; the biggest museum gift that stayed in the country was $25 million to the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, Calif.
  4. The Population Reference Bureau is one of the best sources for deeply informed, non-partisan analysis of global trends in population, health, and the environment. In a new video series of Distilled Demographics, their top demographer addresses such demographic myths as "Europe will be predominately Muslim by 2050." 
  5. Journey into the Heart of Whiteness. As a whole, America is on its way to becoming a majority-minority nation — but that doesn't mean that pockets of homogeneity don't and won't continue to exist. Mother Jones magazine recently interviewed Richard Benjamin about his book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbably Journey to the Heart of America, a first-person account of "being the lone black guy at a white separatist retreat, and other adventures in America's whitest places [including neighborhoods from Manhattan to rural Utah]."   

Other articles, essays, and recent items of interest:
  1. From back in 2000 but still relevant today, a report from Resources for the Future on "Environmental Implications of the Tourism Industry": http://www.rff.org/rff/documents/rff-dp-00-14.pdf. The authors detail three kinds of impacts from tourism: direct impacts (e.g., the energy consumed by museums, the fuel it takes for visitors to get there, the potential environmental effects of museum construction and maintenance, the trash generated by on-site food service); "upstream" impacts (e.g., a museum can seek out green energy sources or convince its suppliers to provide only recycled paper goods or non-toxic conservation materials); and "downstream" impacts (e.g., when museums influence the behavior or consumption patterns of visitors in ways that protect the environment).
  2. Portrait of a Challenging Year — the Wall Street Journal reflects on the business side of museums in 2009.
  3. Looking back over the decade that just passed, the Business Insider offers a list of 21 Things that Became Obsolete, from maps to public pay phones. A broader view of change over the decade comes from the New York Times in the form of an impressive graphic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/27/opinion/28opchart.html (includes year-by-year changes in such diverse cultural markers as "mavericks," "champions," zeitgeist-y logos and trendy verbs).  
  4. What role do museums play in the globalisation of culture? That was the topic for an international workshop hosted by the School of Advanced Study in London (U.K.) last May. Now the participants' discussion papers and biographies are available online. 

Refresh and reflect:
  1. Check out artist Karin Jurick’s "museum patrons" series — paintings of people looking at paintings in museums! Surprisingly compelling.
  2. Visit the largest underwater museum on Earth. Located just below the clear blue waters of Cancun, Mexico, the "new Subaquatic Sculpture Museum aims at drawing visitors to the world’s largest underwater museum, while at the same time keeping them away from existing coral reefs. The museum is still a work in progress, set to open to the public not before 2011. However, four sculptures were already submerged on November 19 [2009] in the Caribbean waters, a mere 1% of the 400 that are planned."
  3. A thought-provoking graphic of 20 Things That Happen in 1 Minute.   

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