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Future of Museums

Strategic Foresight

Print

When present in the physical cafe, customers shift images from their personal interfaces onto the walls through gestural interfaces, curating and communicating their interests.

A Future of Museums Scenario

What if the Smithsonian Institution, which has a wide variety of museums partnered with Google and Blue Bottle to design a series of new collaborative gallery cafes?

CoCurate Cafe encourages museums to embrace a new business model, which will ultimately further their missions to educate, preserve, and provide access.

CoCurate Cafe creates more public engagement and embraces a future of digital museums through public curation. It allows consumers to become collaborative curators in an ever changing exhibition of images.  Using the vast Smithsonian collection as a jumping off point and adding other content from the Google Cultural Institute, customers can also load their own content, assemble collections of artwork, and curate a show with a theme and focus.  The Google program can also populate suggested works, (much like Pandora or Netflix), which allows the CoCurator to discover works they have not seen before, and they can choose to include those works in a collection, or exhibition.  CoCurate Cafe retains rights to the collections, and uses them to make suggestions to other users.

Background

DMBA Strategic Foresight Project 2013

Roles

Strategic Foresight

  • 2 x 2 Future Scenarios
  • Alternative Futures
  • Causal Layered Analysis

Artifact and Presentation Design

Twitter Campaign Manager

Team Members

Sue Pollock, Sara Naegelin, Melissa Breitenfeldt

Back to Business Design Portfolio

“Companies are learning that to stay competitive they must be more strategic and more effective in anticipating important market changes….  Imagining the future is one way to make that happen.”  Sandjar Kozubaev

Initial Question

What will art museums look like, and how will they function in 10 years?  

 

Investigation

  • Scanning: Which involved research on museums, contemporary art, emerging technology and more
  • Created various future scenarios using Strategic Foresight frameworks
  • Created public artifact to gauge public reaction to our possible future scenario
  • Launched a Twitter campaign to gain followers as well as find like minded organizations

Key Insights

  • We saw a surge in articles about 3D scanning in museums, and how it is possible to use these high resolution scans to 3D print replicas of sculptures and artifacts.
  • Issues around funding: With the 2008 economic crisis many museums suffered investment losses, and philanthropic giving to museums dropped significantly. The global economic crisis also made cultural institutions less likely to lend their collections to other museums, thus limiting the number of people that might gain exposure to those pieces/artifacts.
  • There does seem to be hope in terms of new forms of funding, such as Kickstarter which is becoming a major funding source for creatives.