Phone-free childhood

children walking down a shopping street
In 2023, the Irish seaside town just south of Dublin [Greystone] launched a grass-roots initiative led by local parents, school principals and community members to loosen the grip of technology on their younger kids by adopting a voluntary “no smart devices” code and supporting it with workshops and social events...
“It was one of the first places that took collective action,” said Daisy Greenwell, who co-founded Britain’s Smartphone Free Childhood movement later the same year — inspired, in part, by Greystones. “It made me think that we could shift the culture here, too.”
A Phone-Free Childhood? One Irish Village Is Making It Happen. By Sally McGranePhotographs by Therese Aherne, New York Times, March 25, 2026.

Children and Young People's Assembly On Biodiversity Loss

Some members of the 2022 Assembly. Photo: https://cyp-biodiversity.ie/resources/

In October 2022, Ireland held its first Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss. Over two weekends, the Assembly brought together 35 randomly selected members aged 7–17 from across Ireland to explore, discuss and create calls to action on how to protect and restore biodiversity in Ireland.

To make sure the Children and Young People’s Assembly was designed in a way that worked for children and young people, the project was created and facilitated by an intergenerational team consisting of a Young Advisory Team and an independent research consortium.

The Young Advisory Team comprised nine children and young people from across Ireland, aged 8-16. The research consortium included experts in children’s participation, deliberative democracy, and biodiversity from Dublin City University, University College Cork, and terre des hommes, an international organisation with a focus on children’s environmental rights.

The Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss was commissioned by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.
Children and Young People's Assembly on Biodiversity Loss - About. This blog post from DemocracyNext (March 2026) features background and interviews with some of the organizers and participants (Ireland, and related initiatives in Switzerland)

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 ;)

No room for youth

“The empire [of artificial intelligence] is being built by people who treat the world as a spreadsheet, where the ‘human condition’ is reduced to a set of computable variables. In the rooms where the most foundational decisions about our future are made, the child is not present. The needs of a developing mind, the right to privacy, and the importance of a slow, non-optimized childhood are missing from the code, because the architects are optimized for a world that has no room for the ‘unproductive’ vulnerability of youth.”
Karen Hao, The Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI.

Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.

“Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.”
From Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Toy Industry by David Robertson and Bill Breen (2013), a work of business journalism detailing the near collapse and eventual renewal of the LEGO group. Brick by Brick is cited as being one of the best case studies about a large corporation ‘listening to its customers’ and returning to its core purpose and values to find the path forward after suffering self-inficted wounds. The full quote/context is: “Today, LEGO regularly engages children in the process of character development, storytelling, and providing feedback on new playset ideas. ‘LEGO has a great expression for why they listen to kids when developing new toys…Mads Nipper, the former head of marketing and product development, liked to say, ‘Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.’”

Connected Audience Conference — slides, references, and notes

Image of program description listing speakers

Thursday I’ll present a talk at Connected Audience 2025: Factors, Challenges and Opportunities of Cultural Participation for Youth sponsored by the IfKT, Institute for Cultural Participation Research (Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung), Berlin.

The session will be moderated by Ryan Auster of the Museum of Science, Boston, with Kaly Halkawt Lundström of Stockholm University and Dimitra Christidou and Sofie Amiri from the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.

My contribution will be about why we need to create new kinds of museum institutions — everywhere, urgently, starting yesterday — that support young people as legitimate “doers” and problem-solvers in society, and how we approached developing the voice, know-how, and agency of of our visitors at the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai.

I’ll post the full talk (both shortened and full versions) as well as slides, notes, and a transcript below.

Slides and Video

Four thumbnails representing the slides, video, and transcript

References

“The right to the future tense”

This is one of the recurring themes of Shoshana Zuboff’s stunning 2018 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Honestly, Google’s AI did a better job summarizing this concept than any single source I’ve found, including Zuboff’s book iteslf: Shoshana Zuboff defines the "right to the future tense" as the fundamental human ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future. It is the essence of free will, autonomy, and the ability to make meaningful choices about one's life. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism, which involves companies using data to control and predict behavior, encroaches upon this right by limiting individual agency and autonomy. (Google Gemini on May 18, 2025, citing an interview with Zuboff in The Harvard Gazette and a book review on Taylor & Francis Online.)

“Information-deficit model of behavior change.” Wikipedia.

“The knowing-doing gap”

Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell, Founder and CEO of Cultural Inquiry

Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation

On the Opening of the Museum of Solutions (my blog; linkedIn)

Webinar, Create Dangerously: Museums in the Age of Action

via NEMO — the Network of European Museum Organizations, 14 February 2023 (Video, slides and background)

“Do we really need to overthink animated movies of fairy tales?” But then I realized, actually, we do. There are lots of things we overthink in our society. I overthink everything all the time, and most of the things I overthink are not nearly as important as the narratives we tell children.
From Little Mermaid Part 1: The Golden Contract (podcast and transcript), Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of how young people develop their understanding of the moral/legal universe.
It is an often overlooked fact that one of the easiest ways to learn about a foreign culture is through the books it produces for its children. Shortly after my family moved to the Netherlands last summer, we discovered “zoekboeks” (pronounced “zhook-book”) the genre of kids’ picture books that invite you to search (“zoek”) for characters, objects or events obscured by visual busyness. English-language books for kids are hard to come by here, and we didn’t speak or read Dutch yet, so the wordless zoekboek was a welcome find.
The zoekboek is closely related to a German genre, the Wimmelbuch, or “teeming book.” A “wimmelbook” — in this era of fluid borders and cultures, the word is often rendered as a mash-up of German and English — is “a book of plenitude,” writes Cornelia Rémi, a German professor who is the only scholar known to consider the genre in depth.

She argues that the zoekboek and the wimmelbook differ from each other: The zoekboek gives the reader explicit search tasks (where’s Waldo?) and often uses words, while the wordless wimmelbooks “allow for manifold reading options and encourage a highly active response from children and adults, which rightfully might be called a form of playing.” When I now read traditional storybooks (which we also do at home), they seem rigid and prescribed in comparison.
My family reads our wimmelbooks so much, we’re loving them out of their bindings. But they really sank their teemingness into me as I was reading Richard Sennett’s “The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile,” in which he describes how the political revolutions of 1848 redefined nationalism from one based on monarchies or concocted geographic partitions to one based on ordinary rituals, everyday life and authentic selves.

The revolutionaries of the age “believed that a nation was enacted by custom, by the manner and mores of a volk: the food people eat, how they move when they dance, the dialect they speak, the precise forms of their prayers,” Mr. Sennett writes. Wimmelbooks do just that — they show people glorying “in their ordinary selves,” as he puts it.

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.

Museum of Solutions wins international Hands On! Children In Museums Award

Montage of program posters from the Museum of Solutions.

My former home, The Museum of Solutions, Mumbai (MuSo) has won the prestigious international Hands On! Children in Museums Award for 2024.

Congratulations to the MuSo team; founder Tanvi Jindal, the JSW Foundation and supporters — and the extraordinary community of young people MuSo is privileged to serve. <3

The Hands On! award has been given annually since 2011 by the European Museum Academy and the Hands On! International Association of Children in Museums to recognize excellence and innovation in children's museums "through interactive exhibits, educational programs, or inclusive design...that inspire curiosity, learning, and a sense of wonder in young minds."

In bestowing this award, the judges wrote — quite poignantly,

“The different zones on each floor address issues and ideas that are contemporary, bold and emotional. MuSo is not just about exhibits, it is about unlocking the potential within every child to change the world, using exhibitions, educational activities and public programmes to promote learning, enjoyment, reflection, creativity and knowledge. MuSo asks kids to put their ideas into practice, to make projects, finding strategies and solutions, and to realise them.”

The citation continues,

"MuSo is revolutionary, but its ethos is a model for many other countries […] MuSo has a strong belief in the power of children and that children are the changemakers. The young visitors are encouraged and empowered to think for themselves and to find methods and solutions, looking to the future, to make a better world for their communities. The museum does exceptional work, thanks to its extraordinarily committed staff. In the long run, MuSo contributes to raising responsible members of society. Who else but a children’s museum can carry out this educational task in such a holistic way?"

I'm a bit overwhelmed by the judges' words! This feels like what MuSo set out to do so many years ago and yet it still seems bold and aspirational to me, full of challenges and unknowns as well as deep significance.

(I am remembering a story MuSo's Abhik Bhattacherji told me months ago when I was still in Mumbai. As I recall, he had asked an elderly woman in the museum's library — LiSo, the Library of Solutions — how she was enjoying her visit and she burst into tears. She told him that she had grown up in great poverty, and she never imagined that in her lifetime she would see her two young grandchildren happily reading books together in such a beautiful, joyous, purposeful space.

Almost every day brought a story like that, and almost every day brought a new glimpse of just how deeply significant and impactful [and necessary!] this new kind of museum can be. Let's have many more of them. Young people, and our collective future, deserve no less.)

//
Cross posted on LinkedIn

Leaving Mumbai

After 4 years on the project and a year as Director I’ve packed my bags and said goodbye, for now, to my fabulous friends, colleagues and community at the Museum of Solutions (MuSo), Mumbai. Thank you! I am overwhelmed by your kindness and generosity and I’ve learned more from you than you’ll ever know!

It was a privilege to help nurture this new museum and its library (LiSo, the Library of Solutions) from concept to reality; to help build and lead the founding team; and to welcome tens of thousands of visitors to our new state-of-the-art building — “a world-class space to champion the art of finding solutions,” as a reviewer at Condé Nast Traveler recently put it — unique in Mumbai and India, if not the world.

Four years ago Tanvi Jindal, MuSo’s founder, asked if I would help her think about a new “museum of solutions” she was envisioning for the site of an old industrial building in the middle of Mumbai.

How could we create a new kind of museum in one of the world’s largest and most challenging cities to catalyze action for the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, foster new approaches to education, and help young people make meaningful change in the world together?

…And could we also make it fun?

Though Mumbai and India were new to me, this question of museums, play, and civic impact was not. Through years of work with the Smithsonian Institution, the U.N., and other cultural and civil-society conveners around the world I’ve been part of a decades-long movement to *flip the script* on traditional museum practice and help people use their own cultural institutions as platforms for the public good.

And this moment demands nothing less.

With a population of 22 million, Mumbai is indicative of the world’s 40+ megacities (cities with over 10 million inhabitants). Along with megacities like Shanghai, Jakarta, Paris, and L.A., Mumbai is home to daunting social and environmental problems — as well as astonishing creativity and drive. But the problems and the vitality often seem to live in different worlds.

Mumbai is India’s financial capital but over half of its residents live in slums. It is India’s innovation and creative hub (Bollywood! The city of dreams!) but many of its neighborhoods will be underwater by midcentury, drowned by rising seas due to climate change. Education is highly valued, but it is predominantly structured around rote memorization and test achievement, not the world as we see it today.

Young people are often caught in the middle of this dynamic, squeezed between a daily fight for survival, antiquated educational and social systems, and their own profound abilities to see and create a future filled with beautiful change.

Furthermore, young people — all people — have a fundamental human right to be involved in the decisions that will affect their futures, but too few conveners will help them find their way.

If we can learn to solve problems in places like Mumbai we stand a good chance of surviving and thriving in the 21st century. Museums like MuSo can be a kind of civic infrastructure in this regard. By being bold, inclusive, and action-oriented — rooted in reality but also participatory and fun — we can bring people together to build social capital and elevate everyone’s ability to imagine and build a future that is joyous, sustainable, and just.

What’s next for me? I don’t know — I’m still catching up on sleep and processing what I’ve learned! But with any luck, I’ll keep working in this direction: young people and their grownups in vital civic spaces, enthralled by the chance to play and explore together — making life better one small solution at a time.

//

This text is a slightly expanded version of this post on LinkedIn.

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.”
Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:
  • Clean a fish and dress a chicken
  • Write a business letter
  • Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord
  • Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes
  • Handle a boat safely and competently
  • Save someone fron drowning using available equipment
  • Read at a tenth grade level
  • Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy
  • Dance with any age
The list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.
The Long Ride: The surf legend Jock Suthrerland's unlikely life, by William Finnegan. The New Yorker, June 10, 2024. Audrey is Jock Sutherland's mother. She raised her children — all “water babies” — on the coast of Oahu, Hawai'i in the 1950s and 60s.

The moral test of a society

It is time to put a surgeon general's warning on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. […]

Last fall, I gathered with students to talk about mental health and loneliness. As often happens in such gatherings, they raised the issue of social media.

After they talked about what they liked about social media — a way to stay in touch with old friends, find communities of shared interests and express themselves creatively — a young woman named Tina raised her hand. “I just don’t feel good when I use social media,” she said softly, a hint of embarrassment in her voice. One by one, they spoke about their experiences with social media: the endless comparison with other people that shredded their self-esteem, the feeling of being addicted and unable to set limits and the difficulty having real conversations on platforms that too often fostered outrage and bullying. There was a sadness in their voices, as if they knew what was happening to them but felt powerless to change it. […]

The moral test of any society is how well it protect its children. Students like Tina and mothers like Lori do not want to be told that change takes time, that the issue is too complicated or that the status quo is too hard to alter.

One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency you don't have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.

Surgeon General: Why I'm Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms, by Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States. New York Times, 17 June 2024
“My friends and I might still be 11, and we might still be in elementary school, but we know.”
11-year-old Naomi Wadler, as quoted in Students lead huge rallies for gun control across the U.S. by Michael E. Shear. New York Times, 24 March 2018. Her complete statement was, “People have said that I am too young to have these thoughts on my own. People have said that I am a tool of some nameless adult. It’s not true. My friends and I might still be 11, and we might still be in elementary school, but we know.”

Group selfie, Codeavor India National Event. 6 April 2023. CC-BY

I was lucky enough to be the “guest of honor” and keynote speaker at the 2024 Codeavor India National Event in Delhi. Codeavor is a kind of international hackathon and science fair with over 300,000 kids from 70+ countries using robotics, AI, and design thinking to develop their own solutions to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

I was there representing the Museum of Solutions and there was a line of kids wanting my autograph [!!] and/or a selfie, so we decided to try a group selfie to save some time. :) :)

To the right of the frame with a big smile on his face is Dr. Sreejit Chakrabarty, Director of AI at GEMS Education in Dubai — a brilliant guy and fun to be with!