Transforming Education and Labor in a Museum as a Model of the Future: Vacancies in the Future Museum

Abstract

Historically rooted in private collections, most museums today can be seen as public long-term storage devices for knowledge and even more as keepers of humanities’ dreams. In the past 20 years, since the dawn of digitization, this device and the way it is used has rapidly changed. The physical objects in vitrines accompanied by oil paintings and engraved texts today have become multimedia learning centers with interactive media stations, augmented reality, and additional multilingual play outs on the internet, on public monitors, and sometimes even on the museums brand-new media façades. While maintaining their physical items, museums added digital collections, which grew exponentially, and many now outnumber their physical counterparts. Today, after much enthusiasm about the advantages of technology, Museums are stuck in the middle of a process of transformation—just like the rest of us. They still have a physical place, but they have become global communicators in different media. Many are under commercial and political pressure while maintaining strictly divided scientific disciplines under one roof, struggling to collaborate. Experts are still doing a lot by hand, but more and more intelligent content management or collaboration tools and automatic storage systems are changing the way they work. With enough data, could museums one day be autonomous like cars?