Revisit the NEMO European Museum Conference on wellbeing and resilience

In the keynote speech, Elizabeth Merritt, Vice President for Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums, explored three potential futures in the “cone of possibility,” each centered around one dominant theme, with examples of present practice that could be seeds for these scenarios.

Summary of the museum examples and related research cited in the talk:

Museums integrated into the Internet of Things

Use of smart watches and wearable fitness trackers is growing and biometric surveillance is becoming ubiquitous for retail and for security. How might museums plug into the internet of connected devices and pooled data in order to track their impact, and provide personalised recommendations for health and wellbeing?

• Real-time Multi-CNN-based Emotion Recognition System for Evaluating Museum Visitors’ Satisfaction, Kwon and Yu, ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, Volume 17, Issue 1
• eMotion: Mapping the Museum Experience project.
• Tech Interactive (formerly the Tech Museum of Innovation) San Jose, California,  Body Metrics Exhibit
• Send Me SFMOMA, an SMS service that provided an approachable, personal, and creative method of sharing the breadth of SFMOMA’s collection with the public (2017-2020).

The Place-based, Person-centric Museum

With formal systems of health care frayed, many people do not have access to insurance-subsidised health maintenance or support services. More and more often, people are referred to AI-mediated health services, which, which some people don’t trust, and leave most people yearning for human connections. In this future, museums become normalised as places of community, support well-being.

• Front line staff trained to attend to the emotions/health of visitors, offer support
       - Check out a personal musician Museum Soundtrack, Hammer Museum (2010)
       - Art-o-mancy, an experiential game that creates a new relationship between museums and museum-goers (2014).
• Maybe have a museum health/wellbeing consultant on staff
       - Louisville Zoo Walking Club
       - Yoga in the Galleries, North Carolina Art Museum
       - Mindfulness Meditation, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art
       - Picture of Health, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg: a wellness initiative that “harnesses the power of the museum’s collection and gardens as places to enhance wellbeing and find healing and solace.”
• Programming
       - Drumming classes, part of creative aging programsgroup  at the Louisiana State Museum.
       - Group Therapy, Frye Art Museum, an exhibit and associated programming exploring strategies of alternative medicine, psychotherapy, and the wellness industry.
       - Reflections: A Program for People with Dementia and Their Care Partners, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Museums integrated into social systems of health

To create lasting change, new ways of operating need to be integrated into new systems. A whole-of-society approach to health and wellbeing would fold museums into an infrastructure that includes the formal health care system, education, and public spaces.

• School trips that are not just for teaching content, but for learning how to use the museum for self-care:  Empathy Tours at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
• Normalising prescriptions for health from physicians: Musee Des Beaux Arts Montreal.)
• Museums as training grounds for physicians:  Art of Examination, Denver Museum of Art
• Integrating museum collections into medical therapy: occupational therapy and stroke rehabilitation, University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden.
• Hospitals with art exhibits and galleries: Montreal Children’s Hospital art installations.
• Public Spaces with accredited museums: The SFO (San Franciso Airport), an AAM accredited museum with 165 pieces of public art, and, at the moment, 22 exhibitions on a variety of topics from aviation, to the history of the telephone, and Women of Afrofuturism.