Future of Museums

I would like to go!!!

Me too! I have never liked bars, but this might convince me to try a few.

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

Three maps depicting the "walkingsheds" of cafes in Cambridge, San Francisco, and Brooklyn. An interesting look at the possible areas of influence of specific Third Spaces.

MOOCs as entertainment.

Passive surveillance...an outgrowth of proliferation of web-enabled devices and the resulting IoT. What our devices emit can tell more than we might want to share.

All I can say is, Wow!  This is the sort of thing that could have wide-ranging ramifications, and i suspect that museums will, one day, have to decide which legal direction they will head.  Could buying a membership at a museum exempt the member from legal protections?

The repopulating of urban areas is certainly a trend that will affect museums.  But do you agree that the government should end the mortgage interest deduction because focus is shifting from suburbs to cities?  Don't people who buy condos in cities benefit from the same deduction as those buying houses in the suburbs?

Another corporate museum worth noting.

Nike moving away from hardware to focus on software integration with other platforms. A chink the armor of wearable technology as the next big thing that is already here?

Part of the reason that enrollment levels for higher education continue to fall may reflect that many of us "are locating educational opportunities every day in short spurts, online or face to face, and for hundreds of dollars or at no cost."

Instead of working to the advantage of a delivery company's schedules, Parcel is a service that slants package deliveries in favor of the person who ordered them. 

Can be used for prototyping parts, electronics assembly, biotech lab-on-a-chip experiments, and assembling small mechanical systems in hostile environments -- like museums?  :-)

3D printing has made it to our local middle school!