The Museum of the Future | Museums and culture in times of social and technological change

27 Jun, 2018 • Thoughts about museums • 10575

Museums and the Sustainable Development Goals

The sustainable development goals are a universally adopted set of challenges to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. There’s 17 of them, including zero hunger, reduced inequality, and climate action. We have until 2030 to achieve them, and individuals, communities, and institutions around the world have begun to take action accordingly. I believe museums and other cultural organizations can be key players in achieving the SDGs if they chose and dared to step up.

The SDGs are the successor of the MDGs or millennium development goals. They ran until 2015. There were less of them – just eight -, and they were less explicit in their ambitions – “reduce…” instead of “zero…”. Nonetheless, the achievement made by the global community on the MDGs are impressive. For instance, child mortality rates have halved, avoiding 16,000 unnecessary deaths of children under-five each day.

Although the SDGs may seem like a continuation of the MDGs, there are considerable differences. The first is that achieving the MDGs relied on the work of specific professionals. Achieving the SDGs relies on all of us.

Also different is that, unlike in the MDGs, culture plays an explicit part in the SDGs. For the first time, museums and other cultural organizations have been given global responsibility for sustainable development. Specifically, there is SDG 11.4, which encourages everyone to safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage. More generally, we’re at the table!

Like healthcare, education, sanitation, energy, and so many other sectors, culture has been given responsibility for sustainable development. This is a tremendous responsibility indeed.

It is an individual responsibility, as humans and professionals, to dedicate our time, energy, and creativity to making the SDGs a success.

More importantly, it is a collective responsibility to show that museums and cultural organizations contribute to sustainable development. As Andrew S. Potts said at an event in Brussels recently, now that we’re at the table, we need to prove we are worth it to have a seat. Continue Reading
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6 Jun, 2018 • Case studies • 6804

Universal stories in the local museum

Last week I spent a night at Kystens Arv, the Coastal Heritage Museum in Stadsbygd, Norway. The museum’s location is stunning. A cluster of bright red buildings surrounded on one side by green fields and on the other by deep blue water. Its location is also challenging. To get there requires you to get to Trondheim, then take a 25-minute ferry ride followed by a 30-minute taxi ride. The journey is well worth the trouble, but for obvious reasons, most people will find it too far off the beaten track.

Consequently, Kystens Arv is primarily a locally relevant museum. It tells a national story and tries to address universal themes in its programming, but its audience and impact are predominantly local. Most museums are predominantly local.

Telling a universal story in a local museum requires a careful balancing act. For instance, most people do not relate to universal stories such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. These are too abstract, too far from their everyday lives. Instead, they wonder why they cannot grow tomatoes like they used to or where all the birds have gone, as Scott Cooper told me last year. This requires a different approach to storytelling.

Arnfinn Rokne of the Trondheim Science Centre mentioned something similar in the conference we hosted as part of the Making Museum the day after Kystens Arv. He called for locally relevant science centers. Such science centers make universal science locally relevant. Gravity is the same everywhere, but to explain how the laws of science have contributed to specific local circumstances demands another type of presentation.

That doesn’t mean universal and local stories are mutually exclusive. I believe they strengthen each other. The balancing act is between telling a universal story that may be abstract and a way of storytelling that local audiences can relate to.

At Kystens Arv, one of the driving questions is how the museum can help to make sure that children have a better relationship with the world and to the ocean. On the one hand, this implies that the museum tells the local story of boat building and invites school children to engage in this tradition. On the other, it means the museum cannot shy away from topics such as plastic in the oceans. There may even be a direct link: The traditional boats that are at the heart of Kystens Arv’s story are made of natural materials, unlike most contemporary ships. By maintaining and restoring the heritage of boat building, the craftsmen in Stadsbygd may help the global oceans with local skills.

Most museums are predominantly local. To tell a universal story or address a global topic, they best engage their local communities with locally relevant activities around local cultural heritage. The best way to tell a universal story is by starting locally.

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22 Mar, 2018 • Strategy • 8847

A global vision on the future of libraries (or how 32,063 librarians can’t be wrong)

Last Monday the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, IFLA, presented the first results of their ambitious global vision discussion. Over the past year, IFLA has worked with tens of thousands of librarians from all over the world to identify the challenges and opportunities for the library field, its enduring values and purpose, its boldest ideas and most effective local actions. The summary of this process is a highly inspirational document, and not only for libraries.

IFLA’s global vision discussion is a genuinely bottom-up process that has given a voice to all types of librarians and library workers. The discussion started last year in Athens with a workshop with about 150 international participants and continued to involve 9,291 people in 185 workshops and 22,772 people online. The contributions came from 190 UN member states, and all participants together had 469,152 years of library experience. A team of people worked for weeks to analyze the tens of thousands of data points to create the first summary.

What did they find? The key finding is that libraries are united globally in their goals and values, such as equal and free access to information and knowledge. Also, the library world must connect global and local actions effectively so succeed in years to come. The field has shared challenges, but to address them libraries need to acknowledge regional characteristics and requirements.

Underlying this key finding are ten highlights and ten opportunities, which range from updating traditional roles in the digital age to giving young professionals opportunities to learn, develop, and lead. They look inward, challenging the field to be less bureaucratic, inflexible, and resistant to change, and outward at library’s all-important community service. Continue Reading
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16 Mar, 2018 • Technology • 6587

Museums, archives, and the opportunities of open world games

Late last year I was taken on a highlights tour of the records office in Ipswich. In the strongroom, with its hum of climate control and surrounded by mobile shelving, we opened drawers and pulled out boxes. My guide was a staff member and talented storyteller who knew very well where to find the best bits of history and could also be amazed by the thousands of stories hidden in the archives.

An archive such as the one in Ipswich is full of stories and colourful characters. It is full of detailed maps of farmland and villages, the register of countless lives, deaths, marriages, people’s promises and depts and misdeeds, juicy newspaper clippings, the careful documentation of business transactions… Many kilometres of human history.

After the tour, we went for a drink in a local pub and talked about the stories of Suffolk hidden in the archives. The Red Barn Murder, Black Shuck, and countless other mysteries.

I thought about this experience – and many like them – when I read Ed Rodley’s latest blogpost(s) about story world design.

Ed describes how over the past decade or so, narrative-driven massive open world games have become hugely popular. Such games tell hundreds of interconnected stories with thousands of characters. Games placed in a historical context, such as Assassin’s Creed, typically employ historians to ensure the accuracy of these stories, the setting, artefacts, and characters. Continue Reading
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5 Feb, 2018 • Case studies • 6604

Book review: An AASLH Guide to Making Public History

“To fully embrace the inclusive nature of history is to embrace the idea that each of us has “our” moment and each of us is entitled to an acknowledgement of that moment.” – Dina A. Bailey

In September 2010, Bob Beatty of the American Association of State and Local History – a for me hitherto unknown organization – invited me to be an observer in their online conference and provide him with an honest assessment of the experience. I accepted and soon found myself learning about the many history organizations focusing on larger and smaller stories from American history. It was a great experience.

I revisited my assessment in light of a new book edited by Bob Beatty, the AASLH’s Guide to Making Public History. My main (and in fact only) criticism at the time was the apologetic attitude of many speakers in the online conference. Although they discussed essential topics and presented inspirational cases, it regularly felt as if they thought their work unworthy of the public’s attention. The same cannot be said of Bob’s new guide, which presents America’s (public) history organizations as more lively and relevant than ever, pressing challenges notwithstanding.

Bob’s Guide to Making Public History is a wide-ranging book, bringing together essays by important thinkers from between 2008-2017 on topics such as entrepreneurship, change management, relevance, partnerships, etc. Key themes in the book include financial and institutional stability, change and transformation, collections, diversity and inclusion, and the relevance of the history field as a whole. Each essay is introduced by Bob, who adds invaluable context and additional sources.

(Many of Bob’s contributions are appearing on his Medium.)

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