In the new Futures Toolkit, we consider some ways of showing people what the future might be like (in the “Experiential Futures” section, here). This includes everything from narratives and storytelling, to artefacts and speculative design. We also talk about video and virtual reality, citing Dstl’s Museum of the Future – of which there is an excellent video here.
A good description comes from Lancaster University. “Alongside VR exhibits that are futuristic versions of things that already exist – a space-going version of a naval ship, for example – the museum houses a set of fully immersive VR ‘worlds’. These speculative settings are experimental, and are intended to highlight the uncertainty of the future, using techniques of cognitive estrangement and other appropriate narrative and world-building techniques to encourage audiences to query their anticipatory assumptions and cognitive biases. The aim of this project is therefore to promote cognitive flexibility, enhance futures literacy (FL), and ameliorate against the effects of knowledge shields.” (taken from here).
The concept of Museums of the Future got a real boost, of course, with the launch of The Museum of the Future in Dubai. This is astonishing as only the Gulf can be – an amazing building - whose architecture matches its ambition. The Museum invites guests to “Go on a journey through possible futures and bring hope and knowledge back to the present.“
Meanwhile, in Linz, Austria, the Ars Electronica centre is both a Museum of the Future and a place where that future can be created: “Together with artists, scientists, technologists, designers, developers, entrepreneurs and activists from all over the world, we address the central questions of our future. The focus is on new technologies and how they change the way we live and work together.” Ars Electronica is a hub for futures thinking: it includes a Futurelab, an “artistic R&D laboratory and atelier” and runs many events.
Ars Electronica J Blanchard Smith
“The Future Starts Here”, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum in 2018, used 100 objects “as a landscape of possibilities for the near future”.
There are plenty of good reasons why museums of the future are a good idea. As Emily Spiers says (above), they “promote cognitive flexibility, enhance futures literacy (FL), and ameliorate against the effects of knowledge shields”. They are inherently interesting – people are interested about their future, else why would pension plans, life insurance and science fiction exist? Artefactualising the future makes it more “real”, and makes its achievement seem more possible – a vital service when politics and the budrends of the day-to-day can make people feel stuck in the present.
There are, though, some very valid critiques of trying to capture the future in a box – however beautifully designed, well illuminated or even contained virtually within a computer.
The first issue is what we could call speculative limitations. So many of these exhibitions are anchored in existing paradigms – current technological trends, ways of warfighting – which could limit speculation to simple linear progression of current capabilities. There is a balance to be struck here between confining visitors’ imaginations to what is presently conceivable and offering the chance to explore the unforeseen or the disruptive.
We might call the next issue technological determinism. Museums of the Future focus on technology, because that’s sexy. Progress, though, is not always technological – a fact that Ars Electronica understands by incorporating art and the social sciences into its thinking. Technology, for instance, can both be a cause of and a response to human factors like diplomacy, international relations, or socio-economic factors, but by restricting our lens on those issues to be the technological one, we seem to claim that progress here is mediated through silicon – rather, than, for instance, through new ways of thinking about how we relate to each other. Ultimately, this runs into ethical questions and diminishes human agency – autonomous robots, AI agents, independent weapons systems are all very well, but they diminish people’s roles, and potentially, people’s value.
The issue of commercialisation and consumerism is obvious. Explorations of the future, it seems, are for those who can afford to enter the Museum in the first place. Ironically, this just reinforces the issue that the poor will live in the future, yet are often powerless to influence it.
As futurists, we work hard to exclude – as much as is possible – bias from our work, whilst recognising that is never fully possible. It will not be a surprise, then, that a number of issues could be classed under the heading of “Potential bias”.
Almost by definition, the action of Museums of the Future in concretising concepts of the future spring from the inherent biases, overt and hidden, of their creators and curators. A Museum of the Future from a military research organisation may not encompass pacifism; a technological museum may not include off-grid living. A museum is in its own way a marker in the ground of some claim to leadership in a subject – which privileges its cultural context and excludes, for instance, non-Western or low-technology societies and cultures.
Since the future is constantly happening, it could be argued that a Museum of the Future is by definition outdated from the moment it is opened. Building methods and architectural styles change, the concerns of society develop, some apparently positive developments are dead ends while others turn bad, and yet more spring seemingly out of nowhere. The false sense of certainty that museums imply in the futures they contain are inherently limiting – making it difficult for visitors to challenge the trajectories that they show.
So where do we take this? It is no surprise that a futurist would both welcome and question the existence of museums of the future. We encourage the use of alternate ways of looking at and thinking about the future in all our work. These museums and exhibitions are ways of doing that with far more flair and, frankly, budget, than we could ever bring to one of our projects.
The issues around them are solvable – and should be addressed. We need to capture the idea that the future is the property of all people, rich or poor, born and not yet born, from wherever they live. Particularly in a age when we recognise, with climate change as well as increasing geopolitical tensions, that any future will happen worldwide, not just in one pocket or nation of the world, sharing understanding about that future and how to change it, is key. Occupy that space, and Museums of the Future will move from being interesting but flawed to compulsory guides to negotiating the world, as it changes and we change with it.
Written by Jonathan Blanchard Smith, SAMI Fellow and Director
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily of SAMI Consulting.
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