The Museum of the FutureNow: Green Futures

We are interested in broadening public engagement in the understanding of complex problems. We do this through the Museums of the FutureNow (MotFN). The Museums are a series of installations and participatory artworks designed to facilitate the co-creation of stories that illuminate our thinking about the future, rooted in our feelings about the present and our understandings of the past. They open up new ways of engaging with and activating new thinking about social and ecological change.

The MotFN radically reimagine the idea of what a museum is as a catalyst for transformative action. While they borrow from the institutional authority embodied by a museum through its classical forms, iconographies and language, they do not present a fixed version of history. Rather they create a participatory performance of ‘museum’. Using design fiction as a creative tool to explore different futures (Voros), the museum ‘process’ encourages curiosity, exploring the world through storytelling, acting as a laboratory for new ideas.

The MotFN are particularly successful in breaking down power structures that can exist between museum visitors by taking them out of the real world and into a world of play (Huizinga), providing a vehicle for realising procedural and recognition justice in the co-creation of the future [cf. The UNECE Aarhus Convention].

The process of creation of new narratives enables the forging of new understandings of past, present and possible futures that engage participants in innovative thinking and novel approaches to climate action.

Project Team

The Museums of the FutureNow

Project Name

The Museum of the FutureNow: Green Futures

Team Location

Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland

Category

Museum-led