This document summarizes a workshop where participants used several methods to envision future museums. The workshop: 1) Asked participants to envision alternative futures where they must recreate museums after a fictional disaster destroyed existing ones. 2) Had participants work in groups to generate impact cascades ("futures wheels") showing impacts of 3 novel changes and combine these into a single scenario of how the changes might interact. 3) Had participants further develop their future museum scenarios using a framework examining how human activities might change. 4) Had participants represent their future museum concepts visually using postcards and Legos to spark new insights. 5) Presented examples of future museums envisioned, including ones focused on transient experiences,

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APF Compass | October 2017
Time
For three days in June Design Develop
Transform created an unconference space
for sharing ideas, processes, insights,
output and collegiality focussed on futures
and design. The conference began in
Brussels at Erasmus University College
Brussels and then reframed space, time,
and relationships by shifting to M HKA,
the Museum of Contemporary Art
Antwerp. (There’s a report on the event in
the July 2017 edition of Compass).
For three hours in the morning of 17
June, Andrew Curry, Bridgette Engeler
and myself enlisted conference
participants in responding to a fictional
future disaster—the destruction of the
world’s museums by an inimical force. As
honorary Time Lords—we were riffing on
a traditional UK superhero, Dr. Who—
their assignment was to travel to
alternative futures and recreate museums
to fit the future they found.
Space
The Museum Futures session colonized
the main lecture gallery of “ATemporary
Futures Institute” (ATFI) located on the
upper floor of the MHKA. The open
space allowed participants to spread out
and use the floor to map their way into the
future, with ample room to explore
impacts of changes, construct illustrated
story lines, and build their worlds from the
supplied Legos. The large, free form space
meant the working groups could create
their own islands of alternative futures,
but still hear the buzz and laughter from
other ‘future islands’ throughout the room.
The vibrant wall murals were both
organic (in motif) and electric (in colour):
they energized our eyes and our
discussions. Further inspiration for
possible worlds lay just outside this gallery,
in the rest of ATFI’s provocative exhibits
of design futures.
Force
DDT welcomed more than 110
participants from 24 countries, and around
a third of them turned up for the
museums workshop. Diversity of
perspective reframes questions, creating a
productive tension of contrasts that drives
creativity. The session began with
participants introducing themselves
briefly.
As they introduced themselves, we also
asked them to share one novel, highly
transformative or disruptive change with
everyone. This mapped the awareness of
emerging change around the room, and
created an initial shared ‘database’ of
emerging changes. People could also
compare what were considered novel and
transformative changes across our
different cultures. As people introduced
themselves and nominated a change, we
wrote down each change on a post-it to
create our database. To round out the pool
of possible changes to consider, we added
in a deck of printed change cards
originally generated for the Pearson/
NESTA UK The Future of Skills:
Employment in 2030 study. (See my article
in Compass, xxxx 2016, for more on this.)
Leverage
All futures work begins within ourselves.
What are we assuming about the world
around us? What are we noticing about
change emerging before us? What have we
considered about the impacts we will feel
from that change? For futures studies and
foresight, for design and speculative
futures, we must connect our inner and
individual futures work to the outer and
collective conversations.
Andrew, Bridgette, and I share an
interest in collecting tools to jumpstart
bridging from the inner insight to the
collective conversation. This three-hour
session amalgamated four tools we all
Museum mash-up, or vectors of visioning
M HKA x Mānoa x Verge x Postcards x Legos
by Wendy Schultz
The photos that accompany this article were taken
by Wendy Schultz.

2. D D T : M E T H O D S
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value for the thinking leverage they
provide.
Andrew and I (separately and in
conjunction) favour futures wheels as a
tool to explore detailed impacts of change.
Futures wheels implicitly create timelines
via their impact cascade ‘spokes’, a bonus
for change extrapolation and scenario
building.
For that reason, we both support the use
of Mānoa scenario building (see the APF
Compass Special Edition on Methods for
more.) Mānoa begins with three different
changes and their respective futures
wheels, combining them to build a single
coherent scenario.
A necessary step in using Mānoa is
choosing an organizing schema to link
output from the three futures wheels.
Richard Lum’s Verge General Practice
Framework (also in the Special Edition on
Methods) is useful for this, as it asks how a
change or set of changes would affect
human activities.
Once you’ve knit together the bones of a
scenario, vivid communication is the
challenge. A strong narrative helps—but
visualization amplifies narrative. Andrew
contributed the Postcard Exercise (Curry
and Ward, “Postcards as Doorways”), in
which participants team up to select
postcards that visually evoke a key
characteristic of an issue, change, or
scenario that they want to highlight.
Beyond visualization, design helps people
understand a new future as a lived
experience—and Bridgette rounded out
our set of tools by adding in Lego Serious
Play as an aid in helping people build their
museum designs.
Acceleration, Lift-off, Launch
The first step, as mentioned above, was
compiling a list of novel, transformative
emerging changes.
Participants
contributed the
initial list, based on
their own awareness
of change and
change scanning. We
topped that off with
additional change
cards from the Pearson/Nesta UK Future
of Skills study, and made all those available
on a large working table. Participants self-
organized into five groups, and each group
sent representatives, in three rounds, to
choose three different changes from those
on offer. The rule for choosing was to
maximize difference across their three
chosen changes—that is, to avoid having
all three, say, be economic changes, or all
three be technological: mix ‘em up.
Second, each group took their changes,
claimed a large bit of floor space, grabbed
markers and flipchart paper, and explored
the impacts of each change, one by one.
They assumed the change had matured
and was creating widespread impacts, and
first focussed on what its immediate
impacts would be. They then considered
each immediate, primary impact on its
own, and imagined what impacts it would
produce. Each impact was considered as a
new change in its own right, and its
impacts were explored. This creates
impact cascades proliferating out from the
initial change—and implies sequences of
changes over time.
After generating a futures wheel for each
of their three chosen changes, the group
considered all three futures wheels at
once, considering what a world would look
like in which all those changes happen.
How would the impacts collide, interact,
and what new conditions would they
produce?
Source: Wendy Schultz
Figure: The Mānoa Method

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APF Compass | October 2017
Each group then took a Verge
gameboard focussed on the future of
museums to organize and extend their
description of their emerging future. The
Verge framework considers human activity
across six domains: how we define our
world; how we relate to each other; how
we connect information and meaning; how
we create value; how we consume value;
and how we destroy value. With regard to
designing a future museum, that translates
into asking:
• What concepts, ideas, and paradigms
should define museums and curation?
• How should we relate to each other vis-
à-vis museums?
• What arts and technologies should we
use to connect people, places, and things
for museum activities?
• What are the processes and
technologies through which we should
create curations, exhibitions, galleries
and museums?
• How should we consume museums,
collections, and exhibitions?
• What do we need to destroy (remove /
replace) to make new forms of
collecting, curating, and exhibiting
possible for our transformed museums?
The next two steps moved participants
from verbal description of their future
museums to visual and three-dimensional
conceptualization. For the postcards
exercise, Andrew provided more than a
hundred different postcards—photos,
graphic designs, artworks—as a spark to
insight. Andrew asked groups to agree the
story they wanted to tell about their
museum of the future, and then to find
three postcards that helped them tell that
story and add detail.
Finally, participants built out their new
museum design using Legos. Each group
had a pile of assorted Lego bricks and
components in brilliant colours. Bridgette
explained the basic concepts behind Lego
Serious Play, and led a brief warm-up
exercise in model building. She then asked
them to build a model of the most
significant part of their museum or gallery
of the future, and to tell the story of that
model, extracting the metaphor or guiding
principles.
Voyage to Possible Worlds
Our futures travellers returned with
various transformational museum designs,
including The Museum of the Moment, The
Transcendent Institute, and The Museum of
Privacy. This is an incomplete sample,
from all of the work done, which indicates
the range of ideas that emerged from the
process.
The Museum of the Moment
This working group generated three
futures wheels using ageing has stopped;
completely flexible education; and sculptures
are grown as their changes. The Museum of
the Moment features biodegradable pop-
up buildings, managed by a bio-
degradable, organic AI that grows with the
infrastructure. Visitors enjoy the
physiologic, kinetic, interactive buildings
that read needs and engage with people
and the environment.

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The Transcendent Institute
This group chose equal rights for organic and
synthetic intelligences; overpopulation leads to
birth restrictions; and radical redistribution of
basic income; as the changes driving their
three futures wheels. Their exhibit space,
The Transcendent Institute, enables AIs
and humans to reach out and connect with
each other, to heighten mutual
understanding. The Institute is
transdisciplinary and fluid in activities as
humans and AIs co-create exhibits,
creating an evolving, living system that
changes constantly according to human
and AI implementations, behaviours, and
thinking: humanity becomes the art.
The Museum of Privacy
Participants in this group explored the
impacts of privacy is dead; robots as spiritual
guides and priests; and the end of “Asiaphoria”
– slowdown in emerging economies. In this
future world, privacy is the lost art to be
curated, resulting in exhibits including the
Archive of Secrets, Reflections on
Morality with a Polyamory Subject, and
the availability of PSAG – Personalized
Spiritual AI Guides. Visitors are reminded
that “sharing is erasing.”
Return to the Present
Andrew, Bridgette, and I would like to
thank all the DDT participants who
joined us for this very rapid gallop through
four interlinked participatory futures
methods. Energy, creativity, good humor,
and teamwork characterized the morning
– and demonstrated that clearly museums
have a role to play in whatever futures
come to pass. ◀︎
Wendy Schultz is a consulting futurist
based in Oxford, England.