Challenge Accepted: Retrofuture Mapping Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
In today’s letter, Isabella Bruno describes how she went about responding to my invitation to create a retrofuture map for our upcoming campfire session with Jeffrey Linn. Isabella and I hope that, in seeing her take on retrofuture mapping in museums, you’ll join us for Jeffrey’s upcoming session and create your own retrofuture map of your institution. Your map doesn’t have to be “good” — as in pretty or skillful. Your map doesn’t even have to make sense — That is, it might need some explanation for others to understand what you have in mind. That’s ok. Our hope is that the process is rewarding in itself, even if you never share it with another human.
Register for Jeffrey’s Campfire session here, and bring your own retrofuture sketches to the session on Tuesday, April 19th.
Also coming up:
This Friday, April 15th: Anne Ditmeyer on Mapping
Tuesday, May 10th: Dr. Porchia Moore on Cartography for Racial Equity and Inclusion in Museums
— Kyle
When Kyle asked if I wanted to share an example future map in preparation for our upcoming Campfire with Jeffrey Linn, the answer was a resounding hell yes.
Jeffrey is a speculative cartographer (swoon) who uses current research to draw maps of possible futures. A side project I started during the pandemic called Lab for Radical Museum Futures focuses on future thinking for museum workers (and museum lovers). In the Lab, we imagine tomorrow’s museum, today. We tend towards preferable futures — stretching our optimism in union with our imagination. So, yeah, I was eager to do Jeffrey’s homework for the Campfire, which is something you all can do, too!
Here’s the challenge:
Find an existing map of your museum or one of your favorite museums. The older the map the better, but a current map is fine, too.
Using the map as your reference point, make a map of the museum as you imagine it may appear (or as you would like it to appear) in 100 years.
Bring your map to the session to share with the group or drop a pic of your map in the comments below. (We will not put you on the spot or ask you to present your map.)
I love the idea of thinking about the future and I still procrastinated applying the future to my own present. You might be asking the same question I did: Where do you start?
Perhaps I can offer a little inspiration as you prepare for Jeffrey’s Campfire. You might find that you want to apply someone else’s vision for the future to a museum workplace 100 years from now, extrapolating a current strategic plan or picking one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to be realized and totally incorporated into a future museum.
After some hemming and hawing, I had to dive in feet first and follow my gut.
As a designer, I often think spatially so my first step was to look at our museum plan and reflect on how I wish the building itself would change in 100 years. I work at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, in a building that looks way more brutalist than one would expect from the legacy of its architects: McKim, Mead and White.
Our building is monolithic, symmetrical, and has low-lying, diminutive entrances. All these qualities are unwelcoming, like when someone’s mouth tightens in frustration and their lips become half size. That’s our entrance within the stony facade, hiding away. My number one vision for 100 years in the future is to be MORE WELCOMING.
My dream is to have so many entrances that just looking at a floorplan one might say, “Why so many doors?” I have a reason for that: as you walk on the National Mall and see entry after entry, you’re invited over and over and over again to come in. Like a persistent friend who keeps inviting you to hang out. They are the best. They never give up.
Sketch of museum quadrants with directional arrows
The best way to convey circulation and flow is through arrows. So, with arrows in mind, I drew an abstract floorplan of our current museum. The building can be simplified to four quadrants, with circulation (stairs, elevators, escalators) throughout in a cruciform shape. I thought about the wings of our museum (1West, 1East, 2West, 2East, 3West, 3 East) and their themes (for example, Innovation, Creativity and Enterprise, Transportation and Technology, American Ideals). Within the past few years, wing themes were removed from our visitor-facing maps.
NMAH Map 2010-2019 [This map is modified to highlight Wonderplace, a play space for young kids]
Current map of NMAH, 2022
IMHO, our wing themes don’t quite fit together.
Some wing themes sound like Dewey Decimal categories (Popular Culture and Entertainment), others read like exhibition titles intended to pique curiosity (The Nation We Build together). They correspond to our collection’s organization rather than our goal to contextualize history, with power, class, and justice interpreted alongside the objects. 100 years from now, these themes are long-gone.
Is each quadrant identified by cardinal direction? Or new themes?
What relationship could themed spaces have to the absurd number of entrances? With all these entrances going directly into a quadrant — not the circulation space, as in the current floorplan — the museum is less of a huge mall. It becomes four smaller malls.
Each mall could have a distinct lens on US history, but the ridiculous number of doors encourage visitors to move inside and outside, between themes, between exhibitions and gardens. Without the huge monolithic, “tense face” appearance of the building.
I like that. I’m going with that.
Time to theme the quadrants.
I dream of broader domains that frame national history, so I went with the first four possibilities that pop into my head: time, identity, invention, and environment. Maybe an exhibition narrative repeats between the four spaces so that it’s possible to experience similar content through different lenses.
Sketch of NMAH with four quadrants: Invention, Identity, Environment, and Time by Isabella Bruno
Let’s imagine manufacturing as a repeating exhibition narrative. In the “Time” space, we’d have atomic time and the manufacturing age. For the “Environment” space, the focus would be our shift from rural to urban with the rise of factory production. “Identity” space could focus on identifying as a “worker” and how that’s transformed over time across ethnicities, genders, and classes.
I suppose these wildly broad themes could be completely obscure for visitors, but don’t forget this is a dream sequence!
Lastly, 100 years from now, we've finally shed permanent exhibitions. Our understanding of history is evolving all the time, so only temporary exhibits, changing spaces—no. more. twenty. year. shows. ‘Nuff said.
I loved doing this exercise. I know a little more about how I value and interpret our museum architecture, as well as the profound transformation I desire for my workplace and the staff that will follow 100 years from now.
Here are a few more sketches, because once I started I couldn’t just do one. You’ll probably want to map a bunch of preferable futures, multiplying your optimism and stretching your imagination.
I hope you’ll come to Jeffrey’s campfire, do some imagining beforehand, and bring your own map to the session!
Isabella
