A guest conversation between Kristin Alford, Maggie Greyson and Elizabeth Merritt starts from the question about how Museums of the Future create agency and Hope and what can be gleaned from that for general Foresight application.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Follow-Up Links
Black Quantum Futurism, at Hatfield House, Ancestors returning again/this time only to themselvesca.
Octavia E. Butler: Seeding Futures, New Children’s Museum, San Diego CA
Transcript
Peter Hayward: We do our work to engage people with the idea of open futures. To support collaboration and to help them find their agency. Museums which curate Futures exhibits know about what works and why and so we brought back three guests of the Pod to discuss this.
Kristin Alford: What we need in order to be able to do that work is to imagine new systems and new ways of operating and to use the elements of hope theory.
So particularly focusing on, goals and positive images of the future that encourage us agency to make a difference and multiple pathways of getting there.
Elizabeth Merritt: We consistently find that museums are among the most trusted institutions in the U.
S. For museum goers, they are the most trusted source of information. When you look at science, and you look at journalism, and you look at all these various experts. And even among people who aren't frequent museum goers, we come in second to friends and family.
Maggie Greyson: What really inspires hope, I think in this and indigenous futurism and a lot of the future facing social reflections of where a society wants to go is that people are now able to model something that they want to go towards.
As opposed to carrying some of the weight of the past in how the society and power had put them in the past and now it's a re imagining
Peter Hayward: I'm welcoming back to FuturePod three of our previous guests for a conversation. And so I'll start first with Kristin Alford, who Kristin and I share a continent. And for a few years, we shared a bit of university space and we last had Kristin on the pod back in 2021. So welcome back to FuturePod, Kristin.
Kristin Alford: Thanks Peter.
Peter Hayward: What's been happening in your world since we've last heard from you?
Kristin Alford: So I am still at MOD., and I think the interesting things that we've been doing there are really a couple of things. First of all, I think within the context of our museum space, we're really leaning in to developing futures capabilities in our communities.
And so we've had the exhibition this year is really focused on cultivating imagination and hope. And the one we're planning for next year is really around helping people take perspectives on time. And that's been quite delightful. And I think the feedback that we're getting is that those are quite sort of unique experiences in museums.
So that's been really fun. I think the other thing is just, also really engaging on a global level with other future oriented museums and the emergence of this discipline, if you like, or this field of work, which is using the museum as a conduit for developing community futures capabilities.
Peter Hayward: Awesome. Thanks, Kristin. Great to have you back on. Second person in Maggie Grayson. Maggie and I did a podcast a couple of years ago and just recently we had bit of fun playing with the APF IF awards. Maggie, welcome back to future pod.
Maggie Greyson: Thanks Peter. It's amazing to be here.
I love your show. And I love being a guest. Thanks.
Peter Hayward: What's been happening in Maggie's world for the last couple of years?
Maggie Greyson: After I joined the board of the APF I started to see much more broadly how the world kind of interoperates in the organizations futurist organizations and also the silos of decision making support that consultants with different backgrounds bring. I'm writing a book now called making futures present, and it's a field guide for future thinking mavericks and next level decision making in times of extreme uncertainty. And it brings in a little bit of, um, practice from a whole bunch of different disciplines.
But I think that we are at an inflection point where we are now seeing a multidisciplinary collaboration as a value like we've never seen before.
Peter Hayward: Awesome. Awesome. Maggie, great to have you back. And last, our most recent FuturePod guest, only probably a handful of podcasts ago, but I had Elizabeth Merritt who joined us as one of the IF award nominations in that last podcast series.
Welcome back to FuturePod, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Merritt: Thank you, Peter. It's so great to be back.
Peter Hayward: Great to have you back. So I brought the three of you back to have a conversation with yourselves. And I'm going to start you with a question, but it's just the starting question. You're going to take it where you take it. How museums can create feelings of hope. and agency in the future and how you're all experiencing that. But I'm going to ask you to both expand on that, but also draw the links of how people in non museum places can maybe use some of those things.
Kristin Alford: Maybe I should start since our exhibition is so focused on this issue and then we can probably go out in circles from there. So at MOD. the exhibition this year is called BROKEN and that comes from us doing a Future Fhemes Forum a couple of years ago where we did open space technology method to ask people what was important to think about when thinking about the future and everyone said, basically, everything is broken. Capitalism is terrible. Democracy is failing. Education is not fit for purpose. No one can afford housing. And this is in a post COVID kind of context, everyone just felt like none of the systems that we had were serving us.
And so we thought that's going to be a tough exhibition to mount, but we thought we would we thought we would design an exhibition that acknowledged that's the way that people felt, but come at it with the idea that systems have changed and will change again. And, we, what we need in order to be able to do that work is to imagine new systems and new ways of operating and to use the elements of hope theory, so particularly focusing on goals and positive images of the future that encourage us , agency to make a difference and multiple pathways of getting there. So the exhibition that we have designed comes in with a welcoming video that explains that context about acknowledging that things feel broken.
And then each of our gallery spaces have an alternative near present, if you like, about imagining a different system of operation. And then as you go around the gallery space, you are, you have a token that enables you to respond to questions and those questions are based on goals, agency and pathways. And then when you come to the end of the exhibition, you get a little read out about who you are as a hopeful actor, essentially based on your interaction through the exhibition.
And so I'm happy to talk in conversation around some of the alternative near presents. But I think my favourite thing was it was a quote from somebody leaving the final gallery, coming out and going ‘Oh, I really do feel more hopeful about the future’. And I was like, I'll write that down! Cause that's what we've been, that's what we've been trying to do. And the conversations I think have been really useful. Like we, I had a colleague of mine, Jeanette Kwek from Singapore, Jeanette's the Head of the strategic… the Center for Strategic Foresight in the Prime Minister's Office there. And she said, yeah, it really does. It really is effective at making people feel like there are alternatives and you really do feel like you come out of that space, feeling a sense of hope and optimism.
And so that's quite a deliberate ploy by us to, and especially when we're thinking about for MOD. where we're focusing on a young adult audience, it's quite a deliberate ploy to give people some tools so that they don't feel at sea with how the world feels. So for me in reflecting on what we've done with BROKEN, which is very futures oriented and very driven by those future capabilities. And I think it's quite, I think it's quite unique. I don't think there's a lot of other exhibitions that I've seen that do the same thing.
But I think there is something in there that the interaction with museums does do to create senses of hope with people. So I just wondered if you had other kind of exhibition examples or things that you were seeing that, that might prompt a similar sense of hope?
Elizabeth Merritt: I have several examples I've been quoting recently, but before I jump into them, I want to refer to a piece of data that I think suggests why museums might be so good at doing this. So the American Alliance of Museums, where I work, has periodically done a survey of the American public about trust. And we consistently find that museums are among the most trusted institutions in the US.
For museum goers, they are the most trusted source of information. When you look at science, and you look at journalism, and you look at all these various experts. And even among people who aren't frequent museum goers, we're, we come in second to friends and family. So you can only hope that those friends and family are giving them accurate information.
So I think, here's an example of a museum, museum exhibit. I'm going to put that in air quotes, and I'll come back to it in a moment. In Sweden, the Imaginaries project put together a museum exhibit called Carbon Ruins, which is looking back from the year 2053 to document how humans made the transition to a post fossil fuel economy.
And they really brought that to life with artifacts and timelines. And I think that because people have this kind of trust in museums, when they see that kind of future embodied in a museum exhibit, even though it's explicitly fictional, they trust that it could be possible and I think that's why organizations and projects like Imaginaries because this wasn't a real museum, it used a museum setting to do this.
I just came across another project this week called Museums of the Future Now. I don't know if any of you have seen It's by artists Robbie Coleman and Joe Hodges and a professor named Mike Bonaventura And these are online quote unquote museums with programming and workshops around it. And I found in their little blurbs, they said that they're framing it as a museum because they see museums as a quote, shared cultural language that are a way of investing cultural authority and authenticity in the work.
In a way, the project is a participatory performance of museums. And one of the exhibits they've put on is what they call the Solway Hoard, which is a collection of discovered plastic art, very rare plastic artifacts that were excavated in the year 3023 and are one of the few examples of the age of plastic that has been, that has surfaced at that time.
And I think, again, they put it in a museum context because when people see it framed as a museum, it's okay, this has credibility. This has authenticity. I should take these objects seriously, even if they're fictional objects. But, Maggie, have you found this to be true in your work?
Maggie Greyson: I can give an example of one particular exhibit that I saw. It's my current favorite, and it's a Afrofuturist exhibit that was put on by a museum in the city of Toronto. Owned by the city of Toronto. Called Spadina House. And what they had done was they had re imagined someone who was behind one of those locked doors where the servants lived or where the servants worked in this white affluent Victorian era house and cleared all the white people out of the house.
And made the servant actually the master of the house, the owner of the house. And they redid the artwork in the era of the original family. So late 1800s but it was contemporary African American, African Canadian content. You'd see the Tretteraptors painted in like a, almost a renaissance type portrait.
And the movement of the house in a beautiful period piece dress. And, what really inspires hope, I think in this and indigenous futurism and a lot of the future facing social reflections of where a society wants to go is that people are now able to model something that they want to go towards.
As opposed to carrying some of the, the weight of the past in how how the society and power has had put them in the past and now it's a re imagining and it I think it feels great as a woman to see role models ahead and so I'm wondering if either of you have examples of society that has examples of society that reacting in the future and that's somehow captured or amplified or reflected in the museum or because of a museum context.
Elizabeth Merritt: I have one that sounds very much like a first cousin of one of the ones you just described. The Afrofuturist artist duo that call themselves Black Quantum Futurists in Philadelphia created an immersive experience that turned a historic house into a time travel portal. They invented the secret society of temporal disruptors whose members can communicate against centuries.
And what they did is they picked actual black scientists and doctors who had lived in Philadelphia who had never been prominently displayed in mainstream history and made them key players in this fictional society of temporal disruptors and allowed them to play with a lot of real history, but also imagining better futures that were more equitable in terms of who got power.
Kristin Alford: I'd really like to pick up on that idea about the history because I was having a conversation yesterday. Where we're very comfortable with the idea of there being multiple futures. And I think we're also very comfortable with the idea of there being multiple pasts that, even if you're looking at archives and record keeping, you know… my, my team did a, it's History Month here in Adelaide and yesterday, we did a field trip where we did a walking tour of Adelaide, revealing the queer histories of LGBTI communities in Adelaide.
And of course, because of that stuff, because a lot of that history was so secretive and so protected from public eye, it's actually really hard to find in archives. It's hard to find truths about it. So even when we're looking for that detail, we can never really know what the history was necessarily, but actually when we think about how that's portrayed in museums, often it's portrayed as different perspectives of the same history, not of different histories.
And so I think, when you were talking, Maggie, I'm thinking about the role of museums, not just in portraying those different futures, but getting us comfortable with the idea that there are not just multiple perspectives on an experience, but there are also multiple experiences happening in our past, present, and futures as well.
And that seems like a necessary capability for us to be able to take on board or a perspective to take on board in order to do good futures work. So I think that's a really interesting, and I guess that's riffing also Elizabeth off your temporalities that you're talking about.
But then we're so used to museums being able to give us a story of the past and yet we're not used to museums giving us multiple pasts, even if they give us multiple perspectives. So I just wondered if that was prompting anything else for people. But I'm really I'm just because I'm curious about I'm curious about how we hold all of those different things in the space of the museum, which is a place where we can tell stories.
Yeah?
Maggie Greyson: Me too. Me too. Me too. This is one of my favorite things about futures is that we think about multiple scenarios, multiple stories, multiple truths all happening. With the potential to be all happening incongruently, but not necessarily impacting each other because it's a tool.
And so I'm really curious to know if there are museums or if there's been exhibits that actually hold those places, hold the life journeys together and not necessarily for the point of connecting them, but actually maybe for the point of saying, this is completely different perspective on the same topic.
Elizabeth Merritt: That's interesting. I couldn't off the top of my head quote specific examples, but definitely within the last 30 years, I would say there's more of a tendency, for example, for natural history museums to present the mainstream Western story of origins of particular biota or landscape. But at the same time also include Indigenous perspectives on how those people came to be there and their histories.
And presenting them both at the same time without trying to reconcile them. So that's acknowledging different perspectives on how to look at the past.
Kristin Alford: Although I think in the, in Australian context do that, but often it's often those histories are framed with a Welcome to Country and a reference back to, the oldest continuing culture on the planet and being very respectful of that long, continuing line of history.
And then the minute you move into the next gallery space, that, that that continuation stops. And we leap into more, Western natural history perspectives of the world or more more recent, more modern histories of collections. So I think it's, it's a tricky thing because I think what we're picking apart is the difference between, as I said, perspectives on a history and actually different histories.
And those things aren't the same. And I think that's a, and we don't have to resolve it. I just think it's an interesting, it's an interesting place for museums to play. And I think the reason I say that is because of, I just wanted to pick up the conversation around trust. Because - and there's a couple of things here, but the first thing I wanted to want to just think about a little bit was this idea about, we're talking about speculative histories and we're also talking about, through the project you mentioned Elizabeth, speculative futures as well.
And if museums are well trusted places, and yet we're holding up speculations, that does create a space of risk, I think, for museums. As an example, the exhibition we had last year, which was looking at extending the boundaries of the mind and the body, we had an exhibition which was part speculative fiction about new, creation of new organs for the body that might serve different purposes, and an artwork that was really looking at a modular body that you could click and play body parts in thinking about life extension, paired with research from the university around organs on a chip and skin grafts and a whole lot of really innovative things.
And for our audience, it was sometimes difficult to parse the speculative from the real. And that's what, that's what we were trying to do. We were getting them to think about these things, but it occurred to me that wasn't as straightforward as we had assumed. And there was a level of trust placed in us that the things that we were presenting were real, that when we were talking about advances in medicine and click and play modular bodies that people believed that was happening.
And so I think it's a really difficult and interesting place for museums to play, in that place of speculation, when trust is so high and people believe us. So I'm wondering if that’s come up inside the trust work, Elizabeth or Maggie, if if you…
Maggie Greyson: yeah, I'm just, I'm super fascinated at that intersection between holding a space of trust and being a place where everyone can feel welcome. And then the, what we do in some of the strategic foresight or experiential futures work is crafted for a particular means a ‘here's an experience that we want you to use as a tool to come up with new ideas’. And then what you've just mentioned, Kristin, is really interesting because you've got two worlds colliding almost in that instance.
I'd love to hear more about that.
Kristin Alford: Yeah, it is those two. It is those two worlds. And I think, especially when we're somewhat pitched as a, we are pitched as an, as a museum that showcases research, showcases innovation, which are seen as the lead indicators of where some futures might be emerging.
Um, and I think, and people just really struggled with that. With like when things were clearly speculative, it was okay because things were seen as an artwork or a provocation, but putting both of these things together and asking people to query them and work that out in a trusted institution that's showcasing research, but also a futures oriented museum that's playing with the future was just a really interesting sort of space to play.
And we're seeing that in the current exhibition, we've got a exhibit around housing, where we've used the provocation that we have decolonized land and land has been decoupled from investment. And therefore it's been returned to a stewardship model, which means provision of housing is done differently.
And people are engaged in thinking about housing, but the provocation is sometimes, too tricky. And for me, that one's great because we've been accused of being communists and we've been accused of not doing enough to solve the homelessness crisis. And so you can see it's a very emotive issue that people are having discussions around, but being able to suspend the current context to step into a different scenario, to play in that different scenario is challenging for people who are used to, I think, museum experiences presenting a form of reality. So yeah, I don't know. It's curious. I think it's curious and I think it's a really, it's partly due perhaps maybe to the sorts of new museums that we're seeing emerge in the future oriented museums space, which aren't clearly art exploration, which aren't clearly natural history or science center type backgrounds, but they are this sort of new mode of telling stories about the future. And I think there's a really interesting considerations for that class of museums.
Elizabeth Merritt: I've been interested for a long time to understand more about the trust data, because why do people trust museums? So if you try and dig into some of the reasons, for example, people will say one of the factors is because we have real objects, and because we do research, and because we're non partisan, we don't have an agenda.
But it does lead me to wonder if people knew more about how museums worked and the very real, messy, imperfect people behind the scenes doing the research and writing the label copy and having the arguments about what an exhibit should say. Wouldn't they trust us less?
Kristin Alford: Yeah. And also, I think, I think there's good arguments about, I know that you've talked about those Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms, Maggie, at the start of the conversation. But, the museum is a very colonial institution of collecting from other cultures and in very untrustworthy ways, right?
At the heart of the institution is a distrust anyway. So I think the trust conversation around museums is a really interesting one. One of the other things that we've been doing is thinking about, the conditions for trust versus the conditions for innovation. And trust comes from consistency and reliability and credibility, but if you're starting to innovate in a system, you're removing one of those legs of trust because you're trying to do something different.
So it's not going to be consistent or it's not going to be reliable. And I think, I know we've been having a conversation about museums doing futures, but I think when we're looking at also the flip of the conversation, which is around the future of museums, there is a strong case for innovation that then threatens that level of, threatens that level of trust.
So Elizabeth, is there stuff that you're seeing in the future of museums conversation that, that is really pertinent or sitting around some of this space around trust as well?
Elizabeth Merritt: I think one of the issues that you indirectly brought up is when are museums allowed to be playful? There's a, you talk about innovating, and of course the question is innovating around what? Because it's very different to innovate around having AR or VR in the galleries versus innovating around who's actually doing
creating the exhibit content and having the authority to write the label copy and decide what's on exhibit and what isn't. But I think when you start doing futuring in museums and having these ‘what if’ scenarios and presenting possible futures it enters the realm of being playful and , as you say, to signal people that we're now entering the world of speculation and imagination.
We're not just telling you facts. We're not telling you somebody's professional prediction about what's going to happen. We're using what the museum knows about the present as a jumping off point for thinking. It's not much of a stretch because museums have always been places of the imagination. There's also some very good data about what people think are core functions of museums and creativity and imagination are things that they value a lot.
Those are both speculative.
Maggie Greyson: I'm so excited to hear you say that, because my, my, my next question is, what does it take for museums to use those things like creativity, reliability, credibility, when we tend to think people tend to think that the future is unknown, but in fact, all three, all four of us have tools for helping to describe what the future might be like, or could be like, and we do it in a very serious and practical way with a lot of theory behind it and intention to, provoke new thoughts.
So my question to both of you is or all three of you, Peter, is what can we bring to museums and to the audience that goes? Those things that they believe to be true about the museum and those things that we do that we believe to be true about creating a place for people to work through new ideas.
Kristin Alford: It's interesting because I was just reflecting, and Maggie, you know this well, but I was reflecting, we're writing a book at the moment around cultivating futures thinking in museums. And Maggie's generously reviewed that for me. But part of the, part of those threads of really looking at the intersection of the body of future studies and futures thinking and how that was appearing in future oriented museums was picking up the idea of experiential futures. And we've talked a lot about this, the speculative fiction part of that already in this conversation. But the other part was picking up the move towards participatory futures and getting more civic engagement in futures.
And so what you've just said there reminds me of that, and what Elizabeth, you said earlier around who gets to curate, who gets to tell, who decides on which stories are told., We are seeing that move, obviously through the participatory museum stuff from Nina Simon, but we were also starting to see that intersect in really engaging, engaging people in futures work within the context of museums as well.
And so there's something there that I'm not sure I've articulated very well, but there's something there about the museum having more porous walls and having more community input into some of those conversations, not just as a visitor, but also as a participant and a creator of stories within that space, which I think is interesting that we're seeing that both from the museology and the futures thinking perspectives.
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Peter Hayward: I am having fun here listening to the conversation. I've been hearing a lot about how people are when they come to museums, and I'm also wondering whether the people who are coming to museums understand what they're coming there for. I'm going to use the metaphor of where do people train to be able to, to live in the future, where you learn to think and wrestle with speculation, past histories, which have to be speculated on in the future. And that maybe I trust that these people are going to stretch me, entertain me, provoke me, and I trust them to do it in a way that is safe?
Kristin Alford: I was going to say, it's also interesting to think about how many times people go to museums. Some of the data would suggest not a lot. That you might go once in primary school on a school visit, and then you might go once when you've got small children. But most people, that would be frequent museum visitors for most people.
And so there, there's also a question about not just why people are going and what they are expecting, but also who's going. And who we're talking to when we're thinking about museum visitors. And I think that's just a precursor to answering your question. But I think it's helpful to, to acknowledge that there are a lot of people who aren't coming to museums.
Elizabeth Merritt: Oh, I'm resisting the temptation to do a deep dive into visitation data because that's beside the point. But that would be another great conversation. What I was about to say in response to Peter was, I usually think of speculative fiction as the most powerful training ground for people thinking about the future because it's the most accessible and the most, clearly a safe place because you can choose what you want to read and take, consume it at your own pace and decide when to back off if it's uncomfortable.
I think my suspicion is, and this is partly based on data, is more people come to museums expecting to see facts or to see reality. I bet a smaller proportion of people are thinking it's going to provoke them to speculate about things. But I think good museums do create exhibits that support that kind of thinking in a way that make people feel like it's within their reach and makes them feel comfortable and excited about it.
I'm thinking about the exhibit that the DoSeum did in San Antonio a few years ago. San Antonio was celebrating its 500th anniversary and they did an exhibit called Dream Tomorrow Today to help kids think about what San Antonio might be like 500 years in the future And one of the things they did was they created a sort of projection table, where kids could design elements of the city and what was the transportation like what was the power grid? How are they making it resilient against storms and rising tides?
And then they could run the simulation, and see if a giant storm would wipe out the city, which was fun ‘Hey something destroyed the city!’ or they could score a win and find they designed a city that could survive extreme heat or a big storm and that was very powerful and playful and I wonder if some of those kids are going to grow up and remember that when they're applying whatever profession they’ve gone into, hopefully some of them will become city planners, and they're making decisions that will influence the future of the city
Kristin Alford: There is something there also on the informal learning aspect, which is, obviously that's what museums do, allows people to access things in a different way from a formal school based education and allows for lifelong learning as well. But when you said that, I just thought there's something really delightful about the practice of learning as a practice of living in the future, as you said Peter, because the future is inherent, I think, in our understanding of the future, is that things change. Otherwise why bother thinking about the future? So if things change, it requires constantly responding and thinking about those changes, which requires unlearning and learning. And it's just something nice about the way that you phrased that Elizabeth, but I thought, yeah there's something really parallel about the skills required to live in the future and the skills required to keep learning in that informal way.
Maggie Greyson: There, there's a fantastic invitation at the end of Future Shock by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and he throws up the idea without going into too much detail about learning to live in the future. And in my big dream, it would be great to see almost these reenactor villages where you get to go and see how somebody used to make bread and, the cow and stuff like that.
And, for me, there was always a temptation to, break the fourth wall and, like in theater, right? So ‘Oh, I see you with your cell phone’ or ‘that accent isn't really true to the time’. Um, but at the same time you buy into it. Like you actually do want to go see where someone made the shoes.
And and learn what's so special about that. That making process. And so the Tofflers throw up this idea of playing in the future. And I'm really curious to see it melds together like Nina Simon's, invitation to everybody into the museum. And what you're talking about with the DoSeum and let's model something new.
And then what you're talking about, Peter, with a place to train, to live in the future, and so there's all these maybe levers that you can pull to make it stronger for some people and more impactful. And I'm also wondering, how might any of the, this future thinking that we do for museums or for the people who participate in the community and the culture of the museum, how might we make it safe for them to think about the future?
Because not everybody has that same level of risk tolerance. So a couple of big ideas there.
Kristin Alford: That’s the classic Peter Heywood foresight appetite on the futures cone, isn't it? I think that's what's coming to mind for me.
I think it's, that some of that is in the design of the, the design philosophy of the museum and who you're designing for and how you design on multiple layers. Um, which weirdly brings to mind the success of the cartoon Bluey, and how that has been so effective at designing for children and also providing real richness for parents at the same time.
So there's just something in around how you can have entry points for people to meet them where they are, but also have those extension points that really do work with people when they have higher risk or higher curiosity to really go to the edge of what might be preposterous or uncomfortable.
And so for us we know that some of the things that we can do very effectively through Exhibitions, um, we can do, we can talk about a variety of themes but actually some of it we need to do through programs where they're moderated and it's discussion and it's a different type of safety for people.
So having those two things at our disposal helps us be able to address along that risk tolerance to some degree.
Peter Hayward: I love Maggie's phrase of breaking the fourth wall, to some extent you are in museums working in that world, and then you also engage with futures and foresight and communities and speculation and provocation outside of the museum. What are the takeaways for you that you're learning through museums and curation? Of futures ideas and past histories that are useful for people that are working in corporate and educational and organizational spaces.
Kristin Alford: We have a good audience of corporates coming into (MOD.) as a place for, having a different context for strategy and futures conversations. So there's something about popping your executive leadership team in a room that is underneath a exhibit of parachuting cats, in our context, when you've just come through a space where you're asking trees to vote on legislation. and, that there's some sort of crazy, interesting things happening that gets people thinking differently and that helps new conversations. So I think there is the con(verse), we've been talking a lot about the museum as a place of play and a place of speculation and a place of provocation and curiosity.
And those are all precursors, I think, to doing good futures work. And so there is something really valuable, I think, with the museum playing, playing that role. And that's certainly how we see it land, within how MOD. is used by our various communities.
Elizabeth Merritt: I don't have any experience working in the business or corporate environment, but as I'm scanning for what's happening out there in outside museums, but in museum-like ways, I think what some people are learning is that creating this immersive environment, exhibit-like environment is a very powerful way to activate people's imaginations.
I'm remembering, for example, that a few years ago, Jake Dunagan got a brief from the city of Newport, Rhode Island, to come in and create a mock-up of their mayor's office in the year 2061. And he engaged with people in the community and local students to build a mayor's office that reflected a future in which Newport was dealing with rising sea levels and other challenges.
And by implication of the artifacts, they created it for it, mirroring the kinds of issues the city was actually dealing with today. So that's taking a museum technique of embodying what's going on in objects, in documents, in, physical objects on a desk, in photographs and putting it out in the world where the citizens can interact with it in a powerful way.
Kristin Alford: There's just something really nice there about that conversation, I think, between it, that sort of sits around the experiential futures space, both in and out of museums.
Peter Hayward: I think Elizabeth said it, that some people come to the museum to see reality. Even if it's a curated reality and what you described, Elizabeth was a curated reality of a future office. There will be a future mayor. There will be a future office. There'll probably be a future desk with future objects on it. Some of those things we can recognize now. And people in engaging with future realities can almost create the story of how this thing came into being and that, looping all the way back to Kristin’s stuff, is where people feel agency and they feel hope. If I can tell the story of how this came into being, then I'm not helpless.
Elizabeth Merritt: Exactly.
Maggie Greyson: If I'm going to take anything away from this conversation, for me, it's bringing the word curated into the work that I do as a futurist, because I've been using other words like characterized this or scenario that, but I think the idea of curation, and in its own, I guess interacting with the curated experience, do you know that someone is making choices for you and you're okay with that? You lean into knowing that you can't see the whole thing all the time.
Kristin Alford: Yeah, I like the idea of the curated reality or the curated reality of a future. There's something quite ticklish in my thinking about the reality of futures that I think is ah is interesting and relates back to our conversations around trust and reliability as well.
Peter Hayward: I'm going to get us into last words. So how do you want to wrap it?
Maggie Greyson: I think that museums already take a responsibility for the training and the stretching of people's minds and, and the provocation. I think there's an opportunity to help museums understand the responsibility that they already have in curating the past, to applying some of those same methods and points of view and processes to curating potential futures.
Elizabeth Merritt: I'm going to build on that by saying that I think one of the advances museums have made in the last decade or so is slowly becoming more confident about telling people what they don't know. So you have some history museums beginning to be very transparent about what we don't know about the past, and alternate theories rather than a definitive history.
You have some art museums doing exhibits about fakes and forgeries, saying this is a painting somebody thought was real for many years, and now we think it's a fake, it's hard to tell. And I think encouraging that kind of honest exploration of uncertainty will free museums up to have similar conversations about the future as well, this is what we know, this is what we don't know, and it's okay to hold all of those possibilities in your head at the same time.
Kristin Alford: Yeah. And then I'm thinking about where the conversation started, which was around hope and the role of museums in generating hope. And I think, if we're casting a very broad net, as to what we mean by museums, and includes art galleries, museums, science centres. There, there is something inherently transformational about a visit or the possibility of it being transformational, to see the world anew or to be inspired to, to think about a different career path or to, whatever those mechanisms might be.
So the idea of a museum as being a potential space for community transformation in and of itself, coupled wit. the role of thinking about the future and trying to create transformational change,. seems like a really beautiful place to be working, that you are actually doing work in the right place with the right intention to help transform the way that we do live.
So there's something really nice for me about working in that space. And I think that's why I'm drawn to the work of doing and thinking about the field of futures oriented museums, because it does seem like they have the capacity to create a difference.
Peter Hayward: Something that hasn't been specifically spoken about, but I think you've just touched on Kristin, is this, is the notion of the aesthetic and the beauty in the aesthetic of the way we curate and present things. It's not always a beautiful picture that you're presenting, but there is real care taken to create the most aesthetic presentation of this past or future. I'm always drawn when the notion of how beauty, and what moves us, how that links back to our sense of agency and hope and belief in self and belief in people.
Kristin Alford: Yeah, I think there's also, if I think back to the work that I've done as a futurist and a consulting futurist trying to help people imagine alternative futures, a lot of it is, Post-it notes and rich pictures with a bunch of textas or it's prototyping with Lego and it's getting to a certain point, which is models of what things could be.
But as Elizabeth said, with this trend that we're seeing towards developing really immersive, beautiful whole experiences of different things, including different futures. There is a level of scale or a level of interaction that is different in that context that it's hard to get to in a workshop.
And so I like that idea of the, both the transformation, the change, the enabling function of museums, but also that sense of beauty and deliberate expression of something that comes from that art form are both really critical.
Peter Hayward: All right. I am going to reluctantly, but necessarily bring this magnificent conclave of smart people to a close. To each of you thank you so much for returning to the Pod and engaging in this conversation I feel like a spoiled audience, but hopefully the listeners also respond. Thank you very much.
Kristin Alford: Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having us.
Elizabeth Merritt: Oh, I'm very happy to be here. I feel like I've got some new friends.
Maggie Greyson: I think there's some beautiful workshops that the four of us could host together and let's plan a museum of the future, future workshop. Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Kristin. Thanks, Elizabeth.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed the conversation. It was just wonderful to hear such experienced and talented practitioners learning off each other. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If we would like to support the pod then follow the patreon link on our website. This has been Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.