EP 117 Museums in a Climate of Change Part 2: Futures thinking with Elizabeth Merritt

Elizabeth Merritt is the founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums. It’s her job to track cultural, technological, environmental, political and public health trends — and figure out what they might mean for museums and the communities they serve. She thinks about things like: what role could blockchain play in the art world? Could it allow artists to permanently bake royalties into their work, so that they get a share on future resales? Could museums help lead that kind of change? For Elizabeth, this is personal work: growing up, museums were her favorite places to learn and explore. She did well in school, but she learned more wandering the halls of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History on her own. It was a space that nurtured her curiosity. And that curiosity, a belief that museums are places where we can choose to learn, shapes how she sees the future.

Elizabeth says that she approaches her work like a classic futurist: she reads widely — from academic research to news articles to social media — absorbing as much as she can across disciplines. She also draws inspiration from science fiction, especially dystopias, usually the ones that highlight problems and pathways forward. But her job isn’t just about anticipatory practices and strategic foresight, it’s about preparing museums for the future. So, she’s careful to distinguish trends from fads — trends have direction and persistence, while fads fade. For example, when it comes to climate change, she sees museums as cultural institutions as well as potential anchors of community resilience, helping people adapt to extreme heat, cold and severe weather. Still, she says the biggest challenge right now is twofold: how museums can remain economically sustainable and intellectually independent — and, more importantly, how they can hold on to public trust. Museums are among the most trusted institutions in American life, and she believes that trust is a powerful tool for reshaping a better world.

In this Chatter Marks series, Cody and co-host Dr. Sandro Debono talk to museum directors and knowledge holders about what museums around the world are doing to adapt and react to climate change. Dr. Debono is a museum thinker from the Mediterranean island of Malta. He works with museums to help them strategize around possible futures.