Intellectuals from across the museums sector gathered recently for the European edition of MuseumNext. Held at London’s Royal Geographic Society, it was a conference to remember. Tom Anstey was there for Attractions Management
By Tom Anstey | Published in Attractions Management 2018 issue 3
Pepper the Robot, was created to communicate and interact with humans
useumNext has been welcoming decision-makers from the museum's community to its events since 2009, to look at the future of museums and how institutions can adapt to a constantly changing world.
The ‘D’ Word Diversity was among the issues up for discussion at this year’s conference, with Shaz Hussain, assistant curator at the London Science Museum, telling delegates not to “deflect responsibility” on the issue.
Speaking at the previous edition of the conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Hussain had said using the word ‘diversity’ suggests a museum and its white, middle-class audiences are ‘normal’, with any other type of visitor considered to belong to ‘other’ categories. She proposed that ‘diversity’ should be replaced by ‘representation’, with the sector’s goal being to represent the entire community in its work.
Picking up the theme, Hussain said: “Last year I basically trashed museums, saying how much I hate it when museum professionals use the word ‘diversity’. I challenged everyone to think of ways in which they could make a difference and use their own power to create change.
“I receive messages every week asking me to take part in projects and speak at conferences,” she said. “I don’t tell you this to brag – actually I’m exhausted.
“Despite being a curator, I never get asked to speak about collections, only about diversity. Doing that every day isn’t fun.
“I’m not special, I’m not your poster girl for diversity. People of colour won’t carry the load and that means you have to do some work. You can’t deflect your responsibility.
“In all the conversations I’ve been having, none of it is innovative. Next time you slide into my DMs, think hard if you’re asking me to solve your problems or coming to me to tell me about what you’re already doing.”
The intelligent museum For museums to succeed, they must adapt to the ever-expanding presence of artificial intelligence. That was the message delivered by Sara Boutall – from data analytics company Dexibit – who looked at how AI is being used in museums and looked at future trends in this area.
“We have to get our heads around AI in a museum context,” she said. “We expect Amazon to know what we want to buy and Uber to know where we are. People will expect that intuition in our institutions.”
A number of projects have already shown creative use of AI. San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art recently introduced Send Me – an SMS service which acts as an art discovery tool. In Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation art gallery used machine learning to interpret art, pairing digital work together using ‘visual identity’ to recognise art style, objects and even images of Jesus. Artificial concierges are also a new innovation, with the Smithsonian Institute, for example, developing Pepper – a 4-foot-tall interactive humanoid robot.
“We need to embrace AI,” said Boutall. “It’s a growing part of our lives, we need to teach our children about it and we can use it in the world of museums to make them more agile, more open and more flexible.”
Spearheading an initiative aimed at creating community inclusion in museums, Nina Simon, director for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), told delegates about the OFBYFOR ALL philosophy, which she deployed to turn around the failing institution in 2011.
The OFBYFOR ALL initiative stands for “of, by and for the community”.
Now a thriving community hub, MAH was in serious trouble when Simon took over, with thousands of dollars of debt and an identity issue that meant it was struggling to stay relevant to its audience.
Simon asked two new questions – what was the museum willing to change in order to draw new visitors and what was it willing to do to help them feel they belonged?
When she started in 2011, MAH had an annual budget of US$700,000, with seven staff members and attracted 17,000 people a year. Seven years later, income stands at US$3m a year, MAH has 32 staff members and welcomes 140,000 visitors.
Raising funds for communities OFBYFOR ALL was recently launched as a standalone programme for other museums and community organisations, to offer guidance on community transformation.
OFBYFOR ALL has already raised more than US$900,000 and the team behind it wants to involve a million new people in culture over the next two years.
“Answering two questions took us from the brink of failure to stunning success,” said Simon. “We’re able to engage, because we’re of, by and for our community.”
Read more from this issue of Attractions Management magazine
View contents of Attractions Management 2018 issue 3
People profile: Anton Vidal
Anton Vidal is director general of Poble Espanyol which has completed a 10-year, €10m improvement plan
Interview: Coen Bertens
Fairytale theme park Efteling has
gone from strength to strength
during its 65-year history, enchanting
more visitors last year than
ever before. We talk to COO Coen
Bertens about its success
Promotional feature: EAS - Learning curves
This year’s Euro Attractions Show promises to
be the biggest in the history of the event, with
a brand new schedule of seminars to match
Aquariums: High Waters
We visited the brand new Aquatis
Aquarium-Vivarium in Switzerland
for a journey through our planet’s
freshwater environments
Promotional feature: nWave - The big picture
With more than two decades
of experience creating high quality
original content, nWave looks
ahead as it continues to produce
its own industry-leading creations
Analysis: TEA/AECOM Theme Index 2017
The TEA/AECOM Report 2017 shows major theme park
operators had an outstanding year, while stabilised global
economies and strong investment planning bodes well
for the global attractions industry going forward
Analysis: EMEA Focus
Margreet Papamichael, founder of CLEAR Associates about what The TEA/AECOM Report 2017 means for the EMEA region
Review: MuseumNext
Intellectuals from across the
museums sector gathered recently for
the European edition of MuseumNext
Theme parks: Playing the Looney Tune
As new and exciting leisure opportunities
increase in the Middle East, Yas
Island welcomes the US$1bn Warner
Bros World Abu Dhabi. We speak to
the two key members of the team
behind the landmark project
Museums: License to Thrill
A brand new James Bond visitor attraction,
nestled snugly inside a mountain peak
in Sölden, Austria, opened this July. We
talked to the operator and architect
Intellectuals from across the museums sector gathered recently for the European edition of MuseumNext. Held at London’s Royal Geographic Society, it was a conference to remember. Tom Anstey was there for Attractions Management
By Tom Anstey | Published in Attractions Management 2018 issue 3
Pepper the Robot, was created to communicate and interact with humans
useumNext has been welcoming decision-makers from the museum's community to its events since 2009, to look at the future of museums and how institutions can adapt to a constantly changing world.
The ‘D’ Word Diversity was among the issues up for discussion at this year’s conference, with Shaz Hussain, assistant curator at the London Science Museum, telling delegates not to “deflect responsibility” on the issue.
Speaking at the previous edition of the conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Hussain had said using the word ‘diversity’ suggests a museum and its white, middle-class audiences are ‘normal’, with any other type of visitor considered to belong to ‘other’ categories. She proposed that ‘diversity’ should be replaced by ‘representation’, with the sector’s goal being to represent the entire community in its work.
Picking up the theme, Hussain said: “Last year I basically trashed museums, saying how much I hate it when museum professionals use the word ‘diversity’. I challenged everyone to think of ways in which they could make a difference and use their own power to create change.
“I receive messages every week asking me to take part in projects and speak at conferences,” she said. “I don’t tell you this to brag – actually I’m exhausted.
“Despite being a curator, I never get asked to speak about collections, only about diversity. Doing that every day isn’t fun.
“I’m not special, I’m not your poster girl for diversity. People of colour won’t carry the load and that means you have to do some work. You can’t deflect your responsibility.
“In all the conversations I’ve been having, none of it is innovative. Next time you slide into my DMs, think hard if you’re asking me to solve your problems or coming to me to tell me about what you’re already doing.”
The intelligent museum For museums to succeed, they must adapt to the ever-expanding presence of artificial intelligence. That was the message delivered by Sara Boutall – from data analytics company Dexibit – who looked at how AI is being used in museums and looked at future trends in this area.
“We have to get our heads around AI in a museum context,” she said. “We expect Amazon to know what we want to buy and Uber to know where we are. People will expect that intuition in our institutions.”
A number of projects have already shown creative use of AI. San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art recently introduced Send Me – an SMS service which acts as an art discovery tool. In Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation art gallery used machine learning to interpret art, pairing digital work together using ‘visual identity’ to recognise art style, objects and even images of Jesus. Artificial concierges are also a new innovation, with the Smithsonian Institute, for example, developing Pepper – a 4-foot-tall interactive humanoid robot.
“We need to embrace AI,” said Boutall. “It’s a growing part of our lives, we need to teach our children about it and we can use it in the world of museums to make them more agile, more open and more flexible.”
Spearheading an initiative aimed at creating community inclusion in museums, Nina Simon, director for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), told delegates about the OFBYFOR ALL philosophy, which she deployed to turn around the failing institution in 2011.
The OFBYFOR ALL initiative stands for “of, by and for the community”.
Now a thriving community hub, MAH was in serious trouble when Simon took over, with thousands of dollars of debt and an identity issue that meant it was struggling to stay relevant to its audience.
Simon asked two new questions – what was the museum willing to change in order to draw new visitors and what was it willing to do to help them feel they belonged?
When she started in 2011, MAH had an annual budget of US$700,000, with seven staff members and attracted 17,000 people a year. Seven years later, income stands at US$3m a year, MAH has 32 staff members and welcomes 140,000 visitors.
Raising funds for communities OFBYFOR ALL was recently launched as a standalone programme for other museums and community organisations, to offer guidance on community transformation.
OFBYFOR ALL has already raised more than US$900,000 and the team behind it wants to involve a million new people in culture over the next two years.
“Answering two questions took us from the brink of failure to stunning success,” said Simon. “We’re able to engage, because we’re of, by and for our community.”
Read more from this issue of Attractions Management magazine
View contents of Attractions Management 2018 issue 3
People profile: Anton Vidal
Anton Vidal is director general of Poble Espanyol which has completed a 10-year, €10m improvement plan
Interview: Coen Bertens
Fairytale theme park Efteling has
gone from strength to strength
during its 65-year history, enchanting
more visitors last year than
ever before. We talk to COO Coen
Bertens about its success
Promotional feature: EAS - Learning curves
This year’s Euro Attractions Show promises to
be the biggest in the history of the event, with
a brand new schedule of seminars to match
Aquariums: High Waters
We visited the brand new Aquatis
Aquarium-Vivarium in Switzerland
for a journey through our planet’s
freshwater environments
Promotional feature: nWave - The big picture
With more than two decades
of experience creating high quality
original content, nWave looks
ahead as it continues to produce
its own industry-leading creations
Analysis: TEA/AECOM Theme Index 2017
The TEA/AECOM Report 2017 shows major theme park
operators had an outstanding year, while stabilised global
economies and strong investment planning bodes well
for the global attractions industry going forward
Analysis: EMEA Focus
Margreet Papamichael, founder of CLEAR Associates about what The TEA/AECOM Report 2017 means for the EMEA region
Review: MuseumNext
Intellectuals from across the
museums sector gathered recently for
the European edition of MuseumNext
Theme parks: Playing the Looney Tune
As new and exciting leisure opportunities
increase in the Middle East, Yas
Island welcomes the US$1bn Warner
Bros World Abu Dhabi. We speak to
the two key members of the team
behind the landmark project
Museums: License to Thrill
A brand new James Bond visitor attraction,
nestled snugly inside a mountain peak
in Sölden, Austria, opened this July. We
talked to the operator and architect
London Museum will open four new food and drink destinations when it launches its new home
at Smithfield on 28 November, making hospitality a central part of the visitor experience at one
of the capital's biggest cultural openings of the year.
OMA has completed a major transformation of New York's New Museum, creating a larger
cultural campus that combines expanded exhibition spaces with learning, performance,
hospitality and public programming.
A US$50 million (£44.2 million, €51.2 million) transformation of Chicago's historic McCormick
Mansion has created a new destination that combines live magic, immersive theatre, dining and
private membership under one roof.
The Montana Historical Society has officially celebrated the opening of its new Montana
Heritage
Center, a US$107 million (£79 million, €92 million) destination that combines immersive
storytelling with cutting-edge audiovisual technology to bring the sta
San Antonio Zoo has reported a US$283 million economic impact for 2025, following a decade-
long transformation programme that has seen almost US$200 million invested into the Texas
attraction.
Plans for the AU$180 million redevelopment of Reef HQ Aquarium in Townsville, Australia, are
progressing, with the project set to transform the attraction into a global centre for reef
education and conservation.
Abu Dhabi-based investment firm Mubadala Capital has made a binding, fully financed
€1 billion
offer to acquire Pierre and Vacances SA, the European holiday resort operator behind the
continental European Center Parcs business.
Disney has reaffirmed its commitment to investing US$30 billion in its US parks and cruise
business by 2033, using new America250 celebrations to underline the role its attractions play
in supporting jobs, tourism and economic growth.
Expo 2030 Riyadh is being planned as a permanent visitor destination, with organisers
confirming the six-million-square-metre site will become a Global Village after the event closes.
The owner of one of Australia's best-known waterparks has acquired a major competitor,
creating a new attractions business spanning two of the country's largest visitor destinations.
