museum scenarios

783 Design Futures | Summer 2012Stephanie Butler, Jacqueline Hershman, Cesar Medina, Farid Mirmohammadsadeghi

Project Research

Axes of Uncertainty

Scenario Development

Prototype Scenarios

Final Scenarios

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6According to Peter Schwartz, people recognize the truth in a description of future events. That is why scenarios work. Observations from the real world must be built into the story. This is why we started our project on the future of museums with a little bit of primary research. Our team went to Fort Pulaski and the Maritime museum to survey people on what they expected out of their visits to museums and why they thought they were important. Some people went to gain knowledge on culture. Some go to museums for inspiration. The most interesting encounters were when we found that some people hated going to

museums. Sometimes it was because they believed that museums had outdated information. These people said that museums have a responsibility to informing people of new topics, museums shouldnt be all about history. We enhanced this primary research with a plethora of secondary research. Mostly, we researched studies on visitor experiences and museum identity. We cross-referenced this information with the primary research that we gathered. We found that these studies were accurate. This gave us a starting off point into developing our process to crafting our scenarios.

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The second step in this process was finding the driving forces, ambiguity, and predetermined elements which could affect the future. According to Peter Schwartz, driving forces are the elements that move the plot of a scenario, that determine the storys outcome. These are done in teams because different people can identify different things that are important. We developed an era analysis of the history of the museums, initially to determine what was important in the past and what might be still important in the future. We then developed potential models to use in order to determine the driving forces and predetermined elements. One of which was a SWOT analysis that contained a stakeholder map within it. The premise of this model was to determine which stakeholders were strengths and which were weaknesses now and how those same stakeholders could change positions in the future. We then took post-it notes and put

different important factors on them according to social, technological, economic, environmental, and political categories. We then placed these factors on different graphs to show which ones were high in uncertainty and which would have the greatest amount of impact to museums. This was then combined with the SWOT analysis to create a three dimensional matrix. From there, we came up with our axes of uncertainty. We took the post-its from the uncertainty/impact chart and placed them along our new created axes of uncertainties matrices. After this was completed, we were able to begin constructing possible plots for our scenarios.

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We began developing our scenarios by taking a closer look at our uncertainties matrices. We found that we had a lot of information to use and we did not know how to synthesize the information into scenarios in order to construct believable stories. The Generations book by Neil Howe and William Strauss helped us greatly with this. The book talks about the history of the United States and shows that generations are in cycles. The authors were able to trace this back to the 1500s and extended it to 2069. The authors theorize that if history repeats itself like it has for the last four centuries, we are still coming on a secular crisis in 2020. So we took this theory and built upon it and created three possible scenarios based on different crisis that could occur. The three scenario plots were: a distributed crisis, in which multiple micro things

happen that completely change the order of things, a war crisis, this follows the classical secular crisis model, and an identity crisis where cultures go through major changes in identity. We decided to concentrate on crisis aversion because we believed that would give an accurate balance of positive and negative elements in each scenario rather than having one scenario that was positive, positive/negative, and one that was negative. It was also important to focus on crises because any type of businesses finds crisis aversion beneficial so this gave us a means of making these scenarios not just believable but also directly useful for museums.

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The world does not end on December 31, 2012. Many more people embrace a new attitude against the consequences of the fast paced technology in the last decades. On that Christmas parents opt to take their children to interactive museums instead of buying them an I-Pad.

They buy a designer object and cutensils in the museums souvenirs store; several are made in China. It takes only 3 years for Asia to rule quality in manufac-turing. This causes an abundance of artifacts that are quickly distributed by Amazon and Facebook, which now competes in the retail industry.

By 2017, millenials born in the early 80s feel sur-prised by seeing the first I-phone as part of a museum exhibit. millenials from Taiwan, South Africa, Germany, and Ecuador feel identified with the very same smart-phone. People have questions about their authentic lifestyle and territory. Globalization altered space and time and they know it. Travelers and immigrants use Google cultural-maps, a variation of Google-maps to learn about interesting cultures and places. However, they find trouble identifying differences because, slow-ly, the cultural borders and the map blend together. Actually, the only way to find a bit more about other cultures is going to a museum, where large databases in small servers allow storing vast amounts of information about distant towns.

In 2020, Globalization in culture and lifestyle gets out of control

Large groups of people ask themselves one ques-tion: where is the location of our own heritage? Some anxious individuals try to answer this by print long fam-ily trees after the 15-minute DNA scan that has now

been made available at the drugstore. In museums, curators fail also to identify the

boundaries of cultures. Therefore, older members of the community slowly participate by volunteering in organizing content and choosing the exhibits They know their story, and they know how to talk about it. Due to their success, some groups like ocean conserva-tionists use museums to raise their voice and identify themselves. Working as volunteer in a museum is now as respected as working for Apple.

By the end of 2022, museums look more like parks designed by local creatives and not by the large archi-tecture firms from the early 2000s. Here, the elderly share their stories to children in rounded benches (they are the main audience). Middle-aged men visit the park virtually through the Internet because thats the way they learned: they google things. Whether online or not, museums slowly start to integrate and differentiate culture at the same time. Learning from other cultures is a priority now. This implies that artifacts and exhibits are back in context. To see an Aztec civilizations trea-sure people dont go to Austria; they go to Mxico.

In 2025 a lot of innovations occur in these com-munities because of the extensive sharing of knowledge. The freedom to create and exhibit makes innovations as important as art. Thus people become self-motivated to go to these places.

Adults may study a career in the 2027 museum. They are taught soft skills like empathy, honesty, con-servation, and most importantly: diversity. Museums earn their reputation by educating communities that thrive by sustaining their culture and heritage. They live in democracy while the concept of globalization takes on a new meaning.

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Starting in the 2010s, governments, societies, and individuals are becoming increasingly concerned at what is being posted to the Internet and who owns things that are being created and shared. This increases the Internet and globalization woes that have been building since the 2008 economic crisis. The reason for the global economic crisis in 2008 was that banks were connected on an international level via computers and the Internet, which no one ever anticipated. Also, in 2012, there were already debates that discussed what should and should not be censored on the Internet. People are becoming increasingly leery about doing business globally and posting certain business aspects online by 2017.

The difficult aspect of this, is that most of society does not support the Internet being censored. Most individuals see the Internet as a place to post their thoughts to the world without repercussion of doing so. People enjoy the freedom of being able to ob-tain information very easily via the Internet and new technologies. The democracy of finding information and technology allows people to make and build things from their homes, and many gain their own sense of self worth by doing this.

These events affect museums because there is an increase in preservation of information. With the advent of various platforms of social media, new arti-facts and information is being shared online at a rapid rate. The increase in the diffusion science and research discoveries provides more information to preserve. Some of this information causes great controversy. The controversy lies in whether to preserve the research or

not. Some of the latest research challenges many tradi-tional modes of information and thinking. This causes a great amount of tension among groups; government and religious sectors especially.

The controversies increase around 2017 because of the increase in globalization and technology, artifacts are being shared and displayed across cultural bound-aries more often than in the preceding years not just physically, but also electronically. There is a consistent, ongoing battle, especially online at what belongs to whom and it starts to fall into federal level disputes on a frequent basis. There are copyright and patent disputes and arguments on acquisition policies of artifacts both on a museum and federal levels.

As these disputes become constant, there is no real resolve to the problems as it is a new type of problem that no one individual, organization, or govern-ment knows how to solve with many parties interests in mind.

This causes a war to break out in 2020. The war is not like the wars that were fought previous to this date, this war is almost entirely electronic. There is a destruction of open, digital systems. Governments start to place extreme restrictions as to who and what can go on the Internet. This wreaks havoc on many online projects, an example being Google Project. Govern-ments place a lot of money into trying to figure how to fight and prevent this type of war from happening again in the later future. This causes an even worse deple-tion in economic resources even more so than 2008 economic crisis. Funding loss is very dramatic, not just for museums, but for all non-profit organizations and

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assets, instead of people going to museums, museums try going to the people. They experiment with pop up museums that show artifacts that they still have, however, most foreign artifacts have been returned to their countries of origin because of all of the previous ownership disputes, therefore most give presentations and lectures instead.

By 2025, solutions are being made by small groups of people. There is a lot of innovation happening on a community scale. The triple bottom line of busi-ness is finally being achieved socially, economically, and environmentally. The environmental movement reaches its tipping point at this time due to dramatic resource depletion from the war. By recycling, utilizing reusable materials, and not wasting resources, sustainability is no longer an ideal; it is the standard. Communities relearn to live off of what they have. Globalization has not disappeared, but it will take the world, awhile to recover and trust each other from the war.

Museum organizations begin to acquire new artifacts as well as local artifacts and information they lost during the height of the war. Museums still thrive on sharing information within communities; as they have not yet found ways to return to large buildings, but there are plans in place to revitalize some of the most prominent museums before the war. Some smaller organizations adopt the well come to you model completely. They have helped individual communities revitalize themselves and directly help the education of the new generation. This helps the quality of life within the communities and within individual people.

many for-profit organizations. Governments put most of their time and effort towards resolving the conflict. This affects museums in multiple ways, as a result. The lack of funding and with the new technology restric-tions, many museums close their doors, discontinue their online portals by governmental law, and they are forced to reconsider their business model if they want to survive past the war.

While this war destructs systems, particularly on-line systems, and shakes up the world in a very new and profound way, reactions to this war are very similar to those in the past. Cultures see a need to protect them-selves and their relationships and identities because the war is on a mass, global scale. By 2022, people start to realize a pattern in their own communities, that they can preserve knowledge by keeping information local. After the tipping point of the war in 2020, there is a dramatic decrease in the amount of literate people. Parents shel-ter their kids, and many are homeschooled, but many of these students are lacking tangible artifacts that enhance their learning. Museum planners and organiza-tions see this need within communities to educate chil-dren, but these children dont have the means to travel to museums to gather information and they cannot go online because there are strict laws and censorship to information on the internet, as the war is still going on. Previous museum curators also start to see a growing need of preserving ideas that predated the cyber war. This causes a shift in the business model of museums.

With a focus on overly protected children, difficult access to information, and a focus on more communal

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By having the local, communal aspects be the focus of humanity after the war; cultures, governments, and organizations such as museums begin to achieve global respect and reputation that is better than what it was any time before the cyber war.

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The world today is becoming increasingly inter-connected and complex. The economy, world politics, corporations, even the way we socialize and communi-cate involves complex networks and systems. We have already seen the consequences of financial networks with the 2008 recession: a few failures branch out and affect the whole network, causing a system crash. With the developments over the past decade, it can be as-sumed that networking will continue to be an important factor in both private and public spheres. Education, business, the economy, social networking, and technol-ogy all connect to form a unique environment which will impact the role of the museum in the next 15 years.

Even before 2012, large museums began to take on the role of a corporation, emphasizing brand-ing through merchandise and promotional tools. The MoMA, for example, has an online store with hundreds of products available for sale, including merchandise with the MoMA logo. In the next decade, we will see more and more museums develop a strong brand identity which they will promote through merchandise and advertisements. Museums have always been busi-nesses but their essential function has been to teach by exhibiting artifacts. With the increasing complexity of the future, the museum will take on many different roles, blurring the lines between a museum, a for-profit corporation, and an educational institution.

Mirroring the expansive networking seen in the corporate world, museums will begin to develop relationships with each other. A museum in Egypt, over-flowing with artifacts, could transfer objects to

their sister-museum in the United States. Eventually, through communication and information-sharing, mu-seums learn how to develop more interesting, or more complete, exhibits by transferring appropriate artifacts. The bigger museums also start establishing numerous branches all over the world, constantly expanding their network. In 2017, most of the information-shared is still physical but shortly thereafter, a movement away from physical towards digital space will change the way museums, schools, and businesses function.

While the museum takes on a different role, educational institutions begin their own transformation. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s education costs increased each year at an alarming rate. These costs will continue to rise, causing a small crisis within the system around 2018. Students either accept a crippling amount of debt or abstain from education all together. Either choice is detrimental to the future economy. In order to prevent disaster, the government takes action, demand-ing that educational institutions decrease tuition by tak-ing a close look at their operational costs. Some schools increase their partnerships with corporations in order to obtain more funding. Others, utilizing new advances in technology, convert to online schools in order to omit costs needed to maintain physical facilities. As more and more prestigious schools make the shift online, they begin to develop programs which change the way we look at educational experiences. Interaction, flexibility, and personalization are essential.

During this time, around 2019, museums fully

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embrace their online potential by establishing extensive, high quality online exhibits. However, the museums still maintain their physical location in order to store and display artifacts in a multi-sensory environment. The E-museum and online universities, realizing that they have similar roles, join together to support one another. E-museums work with the universities to develop special classes associated with their digital exhibits, which then can be integrated into personalized curriculums.

Personalization and individual interests are a large trend at the time. Availability of information and organi-zation of social groups increases the amount of experts in specialized interest areas. Many people have a par-ticular hobby/interest that they know everything about. The E-museums, noticing this trend and the success of social networking sites, begin developing digital spaces for personal exhibits. People are able to group together personal artifacts and collections online with the op-tion of personalizing the way in which the artifacts are displayed and described. In many cases, the artifacts are true collector pieces but as more people join the movement, everyday objects begin to be integrated into the exhibits. As daily objects are displayed as art, ques-tions arise regarding the function of art and artifacts. Extensive collections of rare artifacts are still given more prestige than the everyday objects. Consequently, people with the resources to acquire rare objects begin to purchase them from public collections in order to add them to their private collection.

Despite efforts to prevent a crisis, the inevitable

occurs around 2020. Government action came too late to fully prevent a drop in the economy. Additionally, numerous small crises pop up around the world. Natural disasters, environmental issues, and the changing function of organizations force society to reflect on how well the global network functions. The United Nations takes on a significant role at this time as a facilitator of action and as an initiator of new policies. Organization is needed in order to prevent a complete collapse of the system. The distributed crisis of 2020 was a wake-up call for the world, influencing the establishment of more international associations and more global policies.

Museums at this time face many different obstacles. Due to decreases in funding and increases in operational costs, many museums close shortly after 2020. The large museums who have successfully developed connections with other institutions survive. They continue their expansion of networks by merging and acquiring smaller, less successful museums. At this point, a museums reputation relies significantly on who they are partnered with whether it is another museum or a corporate sponsor.

New policies discourage private collectors from purchasing public artifacts. Therefore, many private collectors sell back their artifacts to the museums. By 2025, 3D printings of artifacts are available. These high-quality holograms allow museums within the same network to share artifacts without having to move the physical object. The holograms also allow curators to develop unique and interactive exhibits, prompting a resurgence of visitors to the physical museum. As 2027

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comes to an end, the museum begins a new phase, one that combines new technologies, the internet, and physical space, in order to create fully interactive and stimulating learning environments.