Author: Seb Chan

Like many of my friends who work in museums, media or related disciplines, I’ve been feeling the pressure of being ‘too busy to blog’. Not just to blog, but to write anything really. But in the spirit of Dan Hon (who has trained himself to be able to write eloquent things at the hardest of times), it is worth writing something about what’s been going on. Its the end of the year, too, and there’s an entire year to be written about.

As many readers will know, my year has been about getting to the opening of Cooper Hewitt – or ‘rebooting it’ as I prefer to say. The press is all over the museum right now and they’re saying ‘nice things’ about the ambitions the museum staff and the board collectively had for it. More importantly, though, seeing the visitors streaming through the door, many for their first ever visit, younger and more diverse too, has been incredibly gratifying.

Alexandra Lange in the New Yorker captured it well, writing, “At a time when so many museums seem intent on new spaces for new design and new art (like the Whitney, Upper East Side deserter), it’s a relief that the Cooper Hewitt finally spent the time and the money to make their 1902 Carnegie Mansion sing. Rather than being a straightjacket, the mansion’s ornate rooms and halls now form a rich and idiosyncratic frame for design objects of all ages.”

And Julia Friedman’s closing comment in her piece for Hyperallergic was echoed by many reviewers, “The reimagining of the Cooper Hewitt demonstrates an openness to engage not just with the history of design but with its future as well — an ambitious and laudable undertaking.” If you want photos, there’s a room-by-room photo essay at NY Curbed.

I’m really proud of all the things that my team has been able to achieve at the museum. My team’s work in collaboration with staff and Local Projects, Ideum, Tellart, Sistelnetworks, GE, Tessitura, Undercurrent and others has been pretty much universally good. Collaboration at this scale and pace is usually not like this at all.

It is definitely a very different museum now.

Some things we got (mostly) right this year –

– Making the museum ‘digital all over’ rather than creating separate ‘interactive areas’ where visitors, content and experience gets inevitably silo-ed

– Moving away from investing in single-person museum mobile apps in the galleries to focussing on social multi-user huge screens (experiences unable to be replicated online or offsite) whilst welcoming photography and device usage

– Combining the museum reopening narrative with an open access/open source narrative from the open source corporate font with the brand launch to the 3d mansion scan data release and as much of the backend code as possible. Or, in other words, making the most of the opportunity to change ‘default’ practices.

– Putting an API at the heart of everything and ensuring that everything Local Projects and Tellart built interfaced directly with it, even with the developer overhead that brought for all involved

– Putting the collection (and objects) at the heart of in-gallery experiences and using digital media to allow visitors to explore, transform and build upon it in new ways

– Maintaining “velocity and rhythm” with the team and those we worked with most closely, minimising (but not entirely eliminating) ‘crunch’ time

– Continuing to work from a principle of the “smallest dumbest thing” (and then iterate) even when it might have been easier to want to jump in and over-design [Aaron Cope is a master of ‘task deconstruction’ in this regard]

– Our team’s insistence on generous interfaces (coined by Mitchell Whitelaw) privileging browsing over search, which were then nicely realised in-gallery by the designers at Local Projects

– Investing in the right hardware to give the galleries necessary longevity [because at 84″s a 4K resolution is pretty much all that will cut it given that we all have such high resolutions in our pockets] and the content on S3.

– Spending the time and relationship management required to fix the underlying licensing, rights, permissions around objects and media (including loans) to ensure that everything in-gallery is available online for as long as visitors now expect it to be

– Focussing on short-form video production [with subtitling] in the galleries, and the same with audio available on the web

– Building advance online ticketing for general admission in-house that actually works because its very easy [a ‘no-cart’ system] and also saves visitors money

– Making the decision to downgrade the main website from Drupal to WordPress on the basis of better serving the needs of content creators [possibly at the expense of system adminstrators]

It was a relatively quiet year for talks, especially the second half of the year, but 2015 promises more traveling and talking. No doubt some of those talks will look back on the last 18 months revealing more of the back stories and strategic rationales, and some will be more focussed on the ‘next thing’ . . .

It is now my fourth winter in New York, and I have just turned over three years in the city. Its about this time of year that my family misses having fish & chips after work on Bronte Beach, and our distant friends. Fortunately the coffee in the new cafe at work is now up to the expected standard. Small pleasures.

So if you’re visiting NYC do pop by.

Tonight I did one of those things that felt really ‘American’ – I gave one of those commencement-type speeches for a group of graduates of the SUNY/Fashion Institute of Technology Exhibition Design Masters program. The student work was on show at the venue and I was heartened by its quality and diversity and I was excited to be amongst it all.

Here’s my rough notes for what was a 15 minute speech. This is the 12″ extended mix but I’ve kept most of the ‘talkiness’ in. The slides aren’t included but hyperlinks are, because, links are better.

“Hi, my name is Seb. I’ve been working in and with museums for quite a while now and I’m here to try to convince you that, as exhibit designers, that there couldn’t be a better or more exciting time to be graduating.

When I first started working with museums and technology we were still talking about interactive kiosks, and making virtual museums. Back then I had a Nokia cellphone.

This is an exciting time. Especially an exciting time to work in museums.

We have finally all the components in place to reposition museums as truly global ‘seed banks of culture and ideas’.

Even if this is also an uncertain time and there are many troubling things afoot.

Designer Anab Jain wrote (and spoke) last year about a concept she called The New Normal. This, she wrote, was a catch-all for “[this] period of protracted super density. Dystopia and chaos all at once”. I’m a huge fan of Anab’s work and her New Normal is a useful way to describe the conflagration of economic collapse, environmental collapse, and social stress that in engulfing much of the world right now.

It isn’t going away. The New Normal is here to stay. It is times like these that we need museums more than ever to help us make sense of the present.

Museums are changing. They desperately want to change, they really do. And I believe them. And as new graduates it is your job to help them, and to make sure they don’t embarrass themselves by telling too many dad jokes. Because they do that too. Museums are better off not trying to be cool.

Museums now explicitly compete with other venues, experiences, events and media. It is the new exhibition designers job to make sure that when you get someone’s attention that you deliver something compelling and respectful of that visitor’s choice to spend time in or with your creations.

Because the plumbing that we’ve all been waiting for is nearly complete. Museums are finally getting networked and their networks are becoming good enough for exhibit designers to make better use of them.

I note with interest that the big sports stadiums are now kitting themselves out with enough wifi network capacity to deliver individual HD streaming replays to every seat in their house.

And, despite the NSA and now the FCC [watch Vi Hart’s great primer], the network globally is growing stronger. As a public ,we barely think about the physical and legislative infrastructure that keeps it running. That is until its fragility becomes apparent. Like when the main undersea internet cable from Egypt is cut during an uprising.

This same fragile network is what is finally allowing museums to build more porous boundaries between ‘the gallery’ and ‘the rest of the world’. It is your responsibility to experiment and push on these boundaries even more.

You’ll also undoubtably be designing physical spaces to cater for robot visitors too – who will wander amongst the other visitors, streaming vision to other parts of the country or globe. This isn’t distant speculation – it is happening now.

Here’s a great example of distance learning in museums through robotic telepresence in Australia. Much like the currently staid and static Google Streetview walkthroughs on Google Art Project, you’ll become aware of the affordances and challenges of designing exhibitions that look and feel immersive and legible both in the flesh, and through spherical lenses.

I hope when you look outside the walls of the exhibition you consider how new stories can be told at a city scale like the playful Hello Lamp Post project.

And don’t expect that 3D scanning is anything other than the New Normal too. Because where the really pressing and urgent challenges lie are with born-digital objects which, when introduced into museums, act like trojan horses for revolution and change.

As we collect software, code, and physical objects whose existence and operation relies, too, on software, code, and complex networked systems, how will you design exhibitions to reflect the increasingly ‘immaterial present’? Let alone, the coming bio-engineered future?

You, as exhibition designers are charged with deigning the new infrastructure for the museums of the future. Everything you will design is no longer capable of being standalone. Your work needs to plug in to, and build upon the work of others.

If we collectively get this right then we will be;

– enabling new forms of public engagement
– enabling new forms of exhibition
– enabling institutions to collect the present
– enabling new forms of scholarship
– enabling a new type of institution

And not a moment too soon.

Because museum visitors are changing. Back in 2010 when the American Association of Museums commissioned their Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums report (PDF) it warned of the significant under-representation of so-called ‘minority audiences’. Core museum visitors, in 2010, were made up of only 9% minority audiences whilst the minority population of the US sat at 34%. Projected to 2035, minority populations were expected to reach 46% and core museum audiences need to reflect this demographic transformation. This is our New Normal.

Museums are responding with a turn towards participation, experience, spectacle and events.

As exhibit designers you’ll also be actively contributing to the surveillance that is also now part of the New Normal. Surveillance, malevolent and the more benign, is part of the Faustian bargain we have made with networked technologies, and at the very least visitor tracking data is seen as having the opportunity to design better, more usable galleries and effective exhibits.

In such a world, we need new values for exhibit designers that foster openness and transparency. Visitors need to be aware of this surveillance and have agency in how their data is kept and used.

Similarly we need to find ways for exhibit designs, themselves, to be as transparent and revelatory as when the web first came along 21 years ago and that moment when you discovered ‘view source’. Unexpectedly, even as we’re seeing ‘view source’ increasingly obscured in our browsers, we’re already seeing moves towards a ‘view source’ in other parts of the design community with the Open Design movement in Europe and elsewhere.

Perhaps these are utopian dreams. And as we know ‘utopia’ is, by its nature, always out of reach.

As I’ve said elsewhere, we’re ‘building a house in the middle of a fast flowing river’. You are now part of a global community trying to tackle similar problems in a variety of different institutions. Some in the museum sector are trying to hold on to the old world, but you, as new graduates are lucky in that you can escape that past.

This is an exciting time. Especially an exciting time to work in museums.

Go forth and help us figure out how to make museums even more relevant and impactful in the world.”

Big thanks to Brenda Cowan, chair of the Exhibition Design program, for inviting me. It was a lot of fun.

(Another post that has sat as an unfinished thought for months – so rather than finish it, here it is)

As some readers know, I’m buried in an avalanche of work trying to make a formerly historic house/decorative arts museum into something that feels and operates like part of the 21st century. Inevitably this means turning a museum often described as a ‘sleepy hidden treasure’ into something that is visibly more interactive, welcoming, and playful.

However a small group of influential people want museums to be their sanctuary from the outside world, its noise, its people, and its relentlessness.

I can understand this.

Living and working in New York, even the idea of silence is seductive. This isn’t a new desire – but it has gotten more air than usual with concerns about technology, interactivity and participation in museums getting uncomfortably caught up with discussions about ‘new audiences’.

In the tradition of design ideation – let’s reverse the problem.

So for the small group of the museum public who want museums to be their quiet sanctuary, we provide The Contemplator – in the vein of Hugo Gernsback’s ‘Isolator’. A helmet that fits comfortably and provides a focussed field of vision limiting the visual interference of ‘other visitors’. Instead of the audio of an audio guide, a calming white noise generator is provided with noise cancelling headphones to return the sensation of silence to the museum visit.

What would it feel like for those who wish museums to be quiet and empty to be the ones who are forced to adapt?

The best dystopian science fiction often presents the future as dirty, noisy, and crowded. Perhaps the ‘contemplative museum visit’ is not yet the equivalent of the ‘disruptive’ upper crust car rental Ian Bogost rails against – “it’s not car rental that sucks, but dealing with the everyman, being in his presence, even knowing he exists” – so let’s try to keep our increasingly diverse audiences happily co-existing.

Maybe this is already being prototyped in a museum lab near you? Now that’d be fun.

Sometimes the bad guys come out on top
Sometimes the good guys lose
We try not to lose our hearts, not to lose our minds
Sometimes the bad days maintain their grip
Sometimes the good days fade
Hurts the brain to think, hurts the hand to drink
(Ohm, Yo La Tengo)

Yeah its been an “interesting” year – in the manner of that Chinese curse (that apparently wasn’t actually Chinese at all). There’s been a lot going on and the “unnecessarily busy” times of New York City do grind you down. As does the general intensity of injustice and disparity. It doesn’t seem to be that much better back home either. Maybe its just seasonal affect disorder.

However.

After a good run of domestic US talks, there were some very enjoyable overseas ones. The year really kicked off with my opening keynote for MuseumNext in Amsterdam. Although there was much that I could only hint at rather than reveal, that talk and slide deck set up a lot of what followed. Jim Richardson’s conference was remarkable and it was great to be part of it, along with catching up with everyone in Amsterdam who continue to be pushing things forward in a humane manner. Then there was the week in Rio delivering one of the keynotes for the MPR Committee of ICOM, spending time with the inimitable Luis Mendes and getting a whirlwind tour of the Rio art scene along with many discussions of the differing impacts of social technologies in Brazil. The graffiti there was great too and its prominence in the city landscape reminded me of my first time in Montreal long ago for Mutek 2003.

Then there was the week in Melbourne doing a keynote for the Circus Oz Living Archive ARC project at RMIT – one of the really exciting digital archive projects in the Southern Hemisphere that has digitised thirty years of Circus Oz performances. A later, separate trip resulted in a week in Sydney helping the Australian National Maritime Museum figure out where they need to be digitally and how to get there, and a few days in Portugal delivering a keynote for the International Council of Maritime Museums and a ‘Directors workshop’.

Slightly further out of usual orbits, I got pulled into some energising roundtable discussions of human-computer-interaction in Alberquerque and the Preserving.EXE digital preservation discussions at the Library of Congress, along with strategy sessions with ArtStor, and an ongoing role on an expert panel with Council of Canadian Humanities.

I went back to Salzburg for another round of the Salzburg Global Seminar, this time helping establish the framework for a very exciting 10-year program called Young Cultural Innovators that promises to hothouse and nurture a select group of cultural sector professionals each year from ten regional hubs across the globe and all continents.

My team won some awards, and, more importantly, made some pretty groundbreaking stuff out of very little. There’s a lot more of that to come as our collaborations with Local Projects will start to reveal themselves in 2014. We got some great press. As I said in a staff profile in September, one of the best things right now is the immediate small circle of people I work with – they are awesome.

The acquisition of Planetary by Aaron Cope and I for the collection was even more of an adventure to watch as its impact rippled out across the web. If anything I was struck by the sheer impact of traditional press coverage – and the great gulf between existing audiences (the few who know) and potential audiences (the many that can be interested) that it reveals. Never did I expect I would I rue using the metaphor of panda breeding programmes . . . or that the tech press could be so interested in museums.

Aaron and I were invited to lead a group of graduate students deep into the wilds and leave them their with only a few supplies and a rudimentary map to survive with. The students did a great job and the future of the field looks a little brighter as a result – even if some fellow old timers like Nate, Koven and Dana went their separate ways in to consulting.

Time on planes has meant more time to finish books. But I’ve continued to resist a Kindle and my book pile grows ever higher – although, having passed many books on to friends in the great move over to NYC, I’ve continued the practice of passing on. This has become especially important as the number of children’s books grows ever greater as we pass deeper into the voracious phase of mythical creatures, mechanical contraptions, space flight and various craft/science projects. These are seemingly supplemented rather than replaced by YouTube instructionals (would the Rainbow Loom craze exist without YouTube?) and Apps. Books, it appears, are far better for communal familial interactions.

“Let’s simulate late century (sensory) amplification“

Musically it was a fantastic year. I saw some great live shows – the best being Nils Frahm, Clint Mansell doing his film soundtracks in a church, Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory – helped in no small part by the Red Bull Music Academy setting up its home in NYC for all of May. And, of course, Massive Attack did their thing with Adam Curtis at the Armory. While I miss doing my own gigs and my music friends from Sydney, I’ve finally started to adjust to the rhythm of shows in New York and I’ve made peace with any sense of FOMO.

I bought some amazing records. This year, too, Bandcamp provided me with much fantastic music that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, and DripFM continued to be a way to supply some favourite labels with a regular payment. The radical democratising of access certainly makes for a much more diverse musical landscape once you lift the lid and go deep into a genre or sound. Despite this, I keep thinking about the now-5-year-old Spotify and, irrespective of their payments to labels and artists, the more sombre statistic they released was that 20% of their catalogue had never been played. Music discovery, along with general discovery on the web, continues to be a major challenge.

That said, looking back over my Last.FM plays for the year, I dipped back a lot into past memories with my multiple Australian trips each providing the opportunity to bulk digitise more old releases. Fortunately it didn’t feel as nostalgic as it might have because the zeitgeist seems to have finally caught up with the early 90s anyway. Belgian hardcore slowed by a third; early UK breakbeat reimagined by producers too young to remember it as well as those who lived through it; lots of 20th anniversary reissues and remasters of memorable moments of 1993 – it was all happening. It is often said that your music taste hardens and solidifies in your late teens and early 20s, and although I’ve tried to resist that by being involved in the ‘now’, listening back to a lot of techno records from 1992/1993 has revealed a lot of nuance that I definitely only subliminally heard/noticed at the time.

[Update! This Is My Jam has, once again, generated their annual Jam Odyssey so here’s a nice machine-generated mix of my 50 jam selections using the EchoNest algorithms. Go take a listen!]

You might be wondering what music has to do with my work in museums? I talk about it briefly in my interview with Anna Mikhaylova for her Ideas 4 Museums project but like several other museum technologists, music and the social practices that form around sounds and spaces has been a core means for me to understand the opportunities of a museum or other cultural heritage institution to connect people with the unfamiliar. But that is definitely for another post.

I guess that’s the result of finally joining Old Club.

But nothing ever stays the same
Nothing’s explained
The higher we go, the longer we fly
Cause this is it for all we know
So say good night to me
And lose no more time, no time
Resisting the flow
(Ohm, Yo La Tengo)

(More old-ish drafts being pushed out the door)

We talk a lot in the office about the sort of digital experience we want in our new galleries. But without revealing what we are actually doing, here’s some of the conundrums that we’ve been processing over the last year – that are widely applicable across institutions.

In many ways, what we have been really talking about is Ross Parry’s notion of a ‘post digital normativity‘ (see also his paywalled journal article with a look at organisation structures and digital teams in UK national museums as PDF) – a new normal that doesn’t separate a digital experience into something different from the overall museum experience. Other people mistakenly describe this as ‘the elegant invisibility of technology’ whereas in fact it is about coming to a collective agreement that everyday life is inseparable from a technologically-mediated existence.

We’ve all observed visitors taking the #museumselfie, and a smaller cohort of visitors taking photos of object labels, and we’ve all seen families struggle with the anti-social nature of audioguides. We’ve tried to service the informational desires of visitors by deploying QR codes (ugh), NFC/RFID (see London’s Natural History Museum and their NaturePlus cards way back in 2009), and even short URLs to galleries only to find that they are rarely used, or if they are, audience research reveals that the resultant ‘extra information’ lacked the depth and specificities wanted by the curious visitor. (Perhaps an object phone direct to the relevant subject expert curator’s desk would be more effective!)

As museum staffers, too, we’ve also been frustrated at the difficulty of ‘getting visitors back’ as repeat visitors. Dallas Museum of Art’s DMA Friends is obviously one to watch on this. “Technology” was supposed to make that easier – as if its magic touch could transform a ‘nice family day out’ into something called ‘edutainment’ and transform single visit desires into ‘lifelong learning relationships’.

Of course every museum worth their salt is thinking about how to sort out the value of digital experiences in their galleries – be it through large scale interventions or mobile apps – and providing at least the opportunity for visitors to recall their visit later. The latter was probably best demonstrated in 2011 by Tasmania’s MONA, and can also be seen in MOMA’s 2013 media-rich ‘audio guide replacement‘. The former ‘s torch is being currently borne by the Cleveland Museum of Art’s impressive Gallery One. Across the field this threatens to become a race to out-screen and out-size the next institution with little consideration – especially by funders – of the ongoing costs and underlying content challenges.

Even the best don’t get near 100% take up rates – not even MONA which gets closest – where without the supplied device you are set a drift without any labels to guide or inform you of what you are looking at and also beneath the ground without mobile reception to distract you.

Thinking about this from the visitor’s own perspective is revealing because they have little conception of, or tolerance for, the museum’s own inability to meet their expectations. “Why do I need something to make my visit better?” “You’ve run out of devices – that’s bad planning”. The device doesn’t work the way they intuit that it should – “that’s bad design”. The content is little more than an extended label text – “I may as well have just used your website on my phone”.

And you still want to deploy that great technological intervention?

All of these interventions require services and systems to be built that touch on almost every aspect of the museum as well as cross-departmentally. And this is why it has been so difficult for institutions to firstly get it done, and, for those that do, to then get it right.

The front-of-house team has to be engaged enough with the motive and purpose of technologies deployed in the galleries to want to troubleshoot and provide the conduit for feature requests and bug reports between the visitors and the museum. The content production workflows need to be cogniscent of the time constraints for curators and educators so as to not overload them with yet another content production task on top of object labels, exhibition research and educational programming. The reality is inevitably that you will need more staff, not fewer – and not just in technical areas but across the institution as a whole. There will be some ability to restructure and redeploy existing staff to new roles – Lynda Kelly’s oft-heard mantra of “20% smarter not 20% harder” – but the reality may be that you also need 20% more staff!

Some questions worth answering –

– Does the technology make the visit appreciably better? How is this going to be measured?
– What proportion of visitors are going to use it? If it isn’t at least 50% then is it still worth the ongoing investment?
– Can and will there be investment in enough staff to meet the changed demands of visitors should they begin to expect more? What if they want what things that the museum was never setup to provide?

Every single day we poke at these questions. Its not getting any easier, nor is it likely to improve.

First a couple of minor updates before the main course (which is full of long video links . . . ).

Aaron has written up the full length version of the talk in Adelaide for the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material National Conference last week. It covers a lot of the conceptual work around our acquisition of Planetary for the Cooper-Hewitt collection and “what it means to be a design museum” in the early 21st century. Its a good (long) read especially if you haven’t been subjected to one of Aaron’s or my recent public talks on this topic. Aaron and I will soon be in an episode of Museopunks about this too.

Anna Mikhaylova interviewed me at MuseumNext back in May for her Ideas4Museums: A Biography of Museum Computing project which speaks to technologists inside museums. She did a great job editing together something coherent from my caffeinated ramblings and it is now live. It might be of interest to those curious as to why I work with cultural heritage and it builds on a number of earlier interviews for Museum ID and Desktop Mag.

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I spent an inordinate number of hours as a fifteen year old playing Wasteland on my Commodore 64 which I wrote about for The 80s Are Back exhibition when I was working at the Powerhouse Museum. And, in time for the long weekend it got a re-release as a bonus for Kickstarter backers of its long awaited sequel due in 2015. Wasteland looks nowadays like a clunky old-school role playing game and its treatment of a post-nuclear world deeply shaped by the 1980s. But the story and the way it unfolds over many many hours of grinding gameplay (I think I spent far too many hours stuck, low on ammunition and desperately outgunned in the Las Vegas sewers), still makes it one of the best computer game experiences all-round.

As games become more cinematic and cinema becomes more influenced by the structure and design of games, something strange is happening to the way we deal with our mass culture neuroses. Introducing playability into our neuroses allows them to be pushed and pulled at, alternative scenarios and endings explored, as the reader/viewer/player makes use of their (limited) agency. So reading around post-apocalytic narratives in film and gaming, I came across a recent post on the fabulous reborn Snarkmarket that sent me down a rabbithole around narrative design and interactive storytelling in the ambitious The Last of Us.

Ostensibly a triple-A high budget video game for adults, The Last of Us for the Playstation 3, is probably best described as a cinematic narrative (obviously with nods to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road etc) stitched together with first-person survival horror and puzzle game elements – the ‘stitching’ pointing to the challenge of reconciling real interactivity and strong narrative. (Watch a longplay video of it to get a sense of the game if you haven’t played it – be warned, its M17+ territory. Perhaps it is one game that works best as a ‘watching’ experience!).

James Howell’s multipart YouTube deconstruction of the internal systems and logic of the game is remarkable. The way in which Howell draws attention to the way in which the game system is an integral part of the narrative and the playability of these is critical to the player’s understanding and immersion in the narrative itself. The subtle, and not-to-subtle ways in which the game hints and nudges the player through the narrative using frequent learned prompts gives a rhythm and purpose beyond combat sequences. This is a departure from the strongly ‘challenge-oriented’ approach of games in the 80s and 90s where games only expected a very very few elite players to ‘complete’ them. Now, with narrative-based games, the very notion that average players couldn’t ‘complete’ them to the end – and get a satisfactory ending – in a reasonable (but not too short) amount of play time seems ridiculous in retrospect.

What might exhibition design learn from this sort of deeply structured interactive design?

And as far as dystopian/utopian futures of a less interactive sort goes, you can’t really go wrong with Adrian Hon’s History of the Future in 100 Objects. Initially a response to the British Museum and BBC’s History of the World, Adrian’s book is a lovely piece of near-future fiction written from the perspective of 2082 it covers the objects and services that changed the world between 2014 and 2079. In amongst the futuristic whimsy there are, as in all good science fiction, insights into the present across design, technology, sociology and politics – not to mention what it might mean for museum curators to present such a collected exhibition in 2082. The 100 short curatorial essays offer a dizzying vision of globalised future that is equally exciting and terrifying – just the way it should be. Along with many other nerds of my generation I grew up on Usborne’s 1979 World of the Future trilogy (compiled here) by Kenneth Gatland – and I’d love to see an illustrated version of Adrian’s book sometime in the future (hint hint!). I’m sometimes worried about the lack of similar titles for children these days – but that’s usually on my other irregular blog.

The print version launches in London this week for all those who don’t like longform reading on screens. Otherwise make sure you get yourself a electronic copy.