Programme

Signals of Change: a glimpse into the future. This session shares insights from original research engaging 100 global leaders and changemakers—from economists to storytellers—distilling future signals and exploring them in conversation with museum leaders.

In a rapidly changing world, small and children’s museums are uniquely positioned to lead with agility, empathy, and imagination. This presentation explores how these institutions—often underestimated—are becoming essential hubs for community connection, play-based learning, and social impact. Through future-focused shifts, we’ll reframe scale as strength and spotlight how small museums can drive big change.

Featuring real-world innovations from the Children’s Museum Singapore, this session will inspire museum professionals to think deeper, act boldly, and embrace the power of proximity. The future of museums is local, inclusive, and playfully impactful.

We all know what a museum is—or at least we think we do. We know from childhood, and we even have an official definition to which we can turn in times of uncertainty like the ones we are living through. However, is this enough? When we ask a child in Mumbai, a neurodivergent person in Tokyo, a migrant in LA, a Kenyan artist, a farmer in the Netherlands, or ChatGPT what a museum is, things start to get interesting.

In this session, through thought-provoking questions, we invite the audience to reevaluate their ideas of what a museum is by imagining new definitions that are more aligned with today’s pressing challenges.

The United States is in danger of becoming an autocracy, and the cultural sector has been entirely too acquiescent in that process.

Elaine Heumann Gurian discusses how this has happened so easily, what urgently needs to be done, and where green shoots of resistance can be seen.

In a world of compounding crises, museums can no longer rely on outdated structures or static definitions of success.

This presentation invites viewers to explore how disruption can be a starting point—not an endpoint—for meaningful change. Guided by Hillary Spencer, Ed Rodley, and Jennifer Foley, we’ll unpack real-world strategies for rethinking leadership, equity, and visitor experience from the inside out.

Using frameworks like BANI and Cynefin, we’ll examine why “best practices” often fail and how adaptability, experimentation, and shared agency can help museums thrive. Leave inspired, equipped, and ready to disrupt for a better future.

Think about how you came into the museum field. Was it easy? Who helped shepherd you through the process? What internships or other experiential learning opportunities did you pursue? What advice were you given to help you continue working in the field long-term?

What has successfully supported the next generation of museum workers, and what habits and ongoing issues continue to prevent us from retaining brilliant minds who choose this path?

In this session, we explore why how we treat interns and emerging museum professionals is indicative of the future of the museum sector.

Collection expansion is a source of both dynamism and disaster. The vast majority of museums and communities possess solely local collections because they lack the wealth and power to make international acquisitions—not because they lack interest.

Why not open the bursting storerooms of major museum collections to make artefacts, specimens, and works of art available on long-term loan or as gifts to the thousands of museums that want them? Will advances in AI now make this approach finally possible? I think so.

Will the human factors that until recently prevented repatriation stand in our way? Let’s explore.

Museum staff are learning digital tools, accessibility standards, and project management—but what happens when the ground shifts beneath these skills?

This presentation identifies a critical gap in museum professional development: the absence of futures literacy. While we train staff to master today’s challenges, we fail to cultivate the cognitive flexibility needed to navigate tomorrow’s unknowns.

Through evidence from community-building initiatives, organisational change efforts, and learning design projects, discover why futures literacy represents essential infrastructure for institutional resilience—and how museums can begin cultivating it.

What happens when museums stop thinking of themselves as buildings and start acting as citywide catalysts?

ICA San Francisco is redefining what it means to be an arts institution by partnering with visionary developers and civic leaders to activate sites across the city with major commissions and experimental public projects.

Founding Director Ali Gass explores how ICA SF is “unbuilding the museum”—channelling resources into artists and communities rather than bricks and mortar—and proving that public and private collaboration can create a more agile, equitable, and future-facing cultural model.

What if the future of museums was less about predicting trends and more about daring to create them?

Drawing on inspiring thinkers and projects from around the world—both within and beyond the museum sector—we’ll explore how the future isn’t only something to forecast but something we can practise right now.

Examples will highlight practical ways museums can co-create with communities, design for intergenerational futures, and connect global challenges to local lived experience. Museums can become laboratories of the future—where people don’t just reflect on change but dream it, rehearse it, and build it.