Reference slides for Hands On! conference talk: Youth, Megacities, and the New Museums of the Future

A long, excruciatingly comprehensive set of “reference slides” (and work in progress) from my short, November 2025 talk at the Hands On! Conference at the Eureka! National Children’s Museum conference Liverpool.

At some point I’ll boil this down into a shorter, 20-30 slide summary but for now I wanted to try to lay out the whole case in all its glory, warts and all.

Download/view

PDF
Slides (via Google Slides)

Contents

  1. Intro/overview: Why build a children’s museum (or any kind of museum) now?

  2. Interlude — 3 stories

  3. The world we live in — cultural revolution and axiological rifts

  4. What does this mean for young people?

  5. What does this mean for our institutions and practice?

  6. Change is possible

  7. Questions I often get at this point

  8. Helpful frameworks (tools for thinking and working together)

    The Big Frikin’ Wall; Zuckerman Quadrant; Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast, Activism, & etc

    The emergence of children’s rights and the rights of future generations

    Leverage Points in a System (Donella Meadows)

  9. Examples - real-world inspiration (~60 projects)

  10. Current work – bringing the vision to scale

  11. Conclusion

More context (cross post from LinkedIn)

Reference slides for "Youth, Megacities, and the New Museums of Tomorrow" — a short talk I gave at the Hands On! - International Association of Children in Museums conference in Liverpool in November.

I'm arguing here...laying out the evidence and rationale...that we are in the midst of a cultural revolution — a "phase change" in the functioning of the world — that is driving a wedge between young people and their human right to shape and enjoy a common future.

These changes affect all of us profoundly, and in response, I think that children's museums — all knowledge, memory, and "cultural" institutions, really — need to dramatically reconsider their purpose, scope and methods.
We need to up our game, and fast.

As Greta Thunberg told the European Parliament in 2019, seemingly a thousand years ago, "Everyone and everything has to change. But the bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty."

C02 is a big driver of the cultural revolution(s) and "rift" but as I see it, the main challenge lies in the combinatory effects of climate change and biodiversity loss, digital (Big Tech) and biotech, concentrations of wealth and power, and the advent of a new kind of change (accelerating, tipping points, delays between cause and effect) that exceeds our human capacity to think, learn, and make wise decisions in an era that needs, as Zeynep Tufekci says, "all the sociological imagination we can get."

That's *a lot* to take in. It's a big problem space and a big "ask" to figure out a new way to work and act in such an uncertain time. But the great systems thinker Donella Meadows observed that paradigms in transition are actually easier to change.

And the good news is that there are loads of inspiring, practical examples to draw from for those who have the curiosity and imagination to think about our institutions and practice in new way. I've included over 60 examples of projects, exhibits, and strategies in these reference slides as well as a dozen or so frameworks and "thinking tools" that I've found particularly useful over the years.

What is the road ahead? I think it's to move beyond the idea that young people are small "future adults" to be educated and toward the idea that young people are legitimate and forceful civic actors with the rights, capabilities, and moral standing to shape the world on their own terms.

But to achieve this paradigm change, young people everywhere need dramatically better allies and institutions from the world of adults, and there are lessons here for all of museum and cultural practice.

"I came away both slightly terrified about the world young people are growing up in and inspired to do something about it" is how session chair Nick Woodrow, a Board member at Eureka! described my talk, and terrified and inspired is how I feel too ;)

Link/reference: Gaps and flaws in the traditional boundaries of our work

This is a good writeup of my ideas about creating new norms of practice in the cultural sector. (…I had kind of forgotten that I had put these ideas together so clearly!)

Gaps and Flaws in the Traditional Boundaries of Our Work, (PDF) summary of my presentation/discussion by Janus Boye.

  • What it means to be a professional in an epoch of accelerating change.

  • The Big Frikin’ Wall that stands between us / our organizations and the work we should be doing in society.

  • The “inner dialogue” we all have with the norms/expectations of our professional disciplines.

  • The “handoff” between different sectors of society.

  • The taboos around activism (“we have been miseducated…”).

Link to U.N. Museum TEDx talk

For the convenience of some new collaborators, I dumped the video and transcript of my 2016 TEDx talk about the Museum for the United Nations onto a convenience page here:

https://usingdata.com/tedx

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the theme of top-down & bottom-up change, cultural institutions as catalysts for the know-how and creativity of others (rather than the instution as an exclusive/proprietary authority), and citizen participation is still relevant (and a largely unfulfilled vision) today.

Not preordained

Cory Doctorow at a podium giving his speech.
Ursula Franklin told us that the outcomes of technology, they're not preordained, they're the result of choices we make about how we will use technology in society.

And I really like this. This is a very science fiction way of thinking about technology. I think the message of good science fiction is that it doesn't matter so much what the gadget does as who it does it for and who it does it to. Those social factors, they're far more important than the specifications of the gadget. It's the difference between a system that warns you when your car is about to drift outta your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted outta your lane so they can add $10 to your insurance bill this month. I's the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you made a typo and a spell checker that runs under the “bossware” that lets your manager know that you're like the third most typo prone employee in your department so that they can cut your bonus. It's the difference between the app that remembers where you parked your car for you and the app that uses the location of your car as a criterion for including you in a, in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone who is in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I think that enshittification is not caused by changes in our technology, but by changes to the policy environment, changes to the rules of the game undertaken in living memory by named parties who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, who face no consequences and no accountability for their role in ushering in this and should have seen that we live in, who venture out into polite society every day without ever once wondering whether someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.
2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture: Cory Doctorow, at 34:34.

Regarding the obstacles faced by young activists

...Young activists face additional obstacles when they seek to make their voices heard. [Mary Lawlor, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders] identified intimidation and harassment in online spaces and the media, lack of adequate support from traditional allies, academic sanctions, and legal, administrative, and practical barriers to participation in civic space as just some of the hurdles faced by child and youth activists. Despite these barriers, she notes, “Child and youth human rights defenders have been at the forefront of human rights movements and have achieved a significant impact, which should be acknowledged, celebrated and highlighted.”
From the report On Thin Ice: Disproportionate Responses to Climate Change Protesters in Democratic Countries. Climate Rights International. September 2024.

Regarding the role of museums in climate protests

[Protesters] believe that museums hold unique significance in the fight against climate change. They told Climate Rights International that museums are institutions that safeguard our history. They believe museums act as cultural institutions and often serve as symbolic representations of societal values and heritage. By staging protests at museums, some activists believe they can strategically draw attention to the interconnectedness of environmental issues and cultural preservation, emphasizing the threat climate change poses to both natural ecosystems and human history."
From the report On Thin Ice: Disproportionate Responses to Climate Change Protesters in Democratic Countries. Climate Rights International. September 2024.
We have been working with amazing young people here in Hawai'i. [...] The young people today, they are determined. They understand what's happening to their planet, and they are committed to advocating for a better future for them and generations to come.
Julia Olson, as quoted in Young climate activists just won a ‘historic’ settlement by Victoria Bisset, Washington Post. June 28, 2024. I've ligtly edited/shortened Olson's quote.
Olson is the co-executive director and chief legal counsel of Our Children's Trust, which has been representing young people in lawsuits claiming that government inaction (or worse) has violated young people's right to a clean environment. The article outlines a “historic” settlement between youth activists and the state of Hawai'i that requires the state to “cut its transportation sector’s planet-warming pollution and to consult with young people about its climate impact.”