By Kristin Alford and Natalie Carfora
A recent exhibition at MOD. in Adelaide South Australia allowed visitors to explore the trajectories of multiple drivers of change from both interior and exterior perspectives. Through the experience of the SEVEN SIBLINGS FROM THE FUTURE exhibition, and meeting a range of characters grappling with living in 2050, visitors were able to gain a richer understanding of plausible futures and leave feeling empowered about their capacity to make a difference.
Exploring futures in cultural institutions
We are living in an era where reliable heuristics no longer hold. The impacts of climate change, digital disruption, urbanization, pandemics and social inequity are challenging long-held beliefs about what transition to adulthood, work and a meaningful life might be. It is in this context that MOD. seeks to engage young people. As a future-focused museum of discovery. MOD. draws on foresight frameworks and multidisciplinary research to design and deliver exhibitions and experiences that build relevant capabilities for facing uncertain futures. A recent exhibition, SEVEN SIBLINGS FROM THE FUTURE, used a narrative structure to raise awareness about significant drivers of change.
The Exhibition
When visitors entered, they were transported to the year 2050 to a place called Eucalara. Part of southern Australia, Eucalara is already feeling the impact of climate change. Climate refugees started arriving decades ago, invasive species are on the move, and water has become an increasingly precious resource. Amongst all this are seven siblings. They inherited this land from their great-grandmother but cannot agree on its future. They each have a different core value and a different idea for what qualifies a good life.
Figure 1: Visitors in the setting of Eucalara within the SEVEN SIBLINGS Exhibition (Photo: Katie Edwards)
Adapted from its original display at the Heureka Science Centre in Helsinki, SEVEN SIBLINGS FROM THE FUTURE explored the future of Australia through the eyes of these seven siblings and encouraged visitors to consider their own roles in shaping a shared future.
As visitors progressed throughout the exhibition, they met with each sibling in the form of a life-size video. The sibling introduced themselves and the problem that they were experiencing, while encouraging the visitor to help solve this problem by making choices or playing an interactive game.
Figure 2: Luca’s introductory video as an example of meeting the siblings (Photo: Katie Edwards)
Visitors’ responses were recorded through an app or an exhibition “passport,” culminating with the discovery of their “soul sibling” – the sibling who was most like them. This gave the visitor the opportunity to find out more about their shared core value and how their perspective might be important in shaping the future for Australia.
Figure 3: Visitor with passport to record interactive data (Photo: Sia Duff)
Mapping to Future Drivers
We drew on insights from the Australian Academy of Sciences: Living Scenarios to 2050 project to base our research for imagining an Australian future, where the conditions were that the ideas were “plausible (consistent with natural laws), acceptable (consistent with aspirations for human wellbeing) and workable (agreed to the extent necessary for action)” (Raupach et al., 2012).
In the Finnish original, each of the seven siblings were created to depict a different view of a shared future, one exterior to the characters and shape their stories. For example, Julia’s story focuses on the future of climate change and the environmental changes that have taken place. However, in MOD.’s adaptation the exhibition team decided to consider the characters in a more holistic way, including how these exterior pressures shaped their interior selves and stories. We wanted to include additional detail around what drove the characters and their values, which led to us creating interior future drivers. In this way, while not necessarily applying a full integral scanning framework, both interior and exterior factors could be captured as drivers for change (Voros, 2003).
The interior and exterior futures play into each other. While these additions mostly made minimal changes to the exhibition, they provided additional themes to explore in exhibition programming, the exhibition podcast, and in discussions with visitors on the gallery floor.
Ava
Ava was genetically engineered to be super intelligent. As a student astronaut, they are living on a space station during their final year of schooling. Visitors meet Ava studying for their final exams, which are designed to test teamwork and collaboration. These are two skills that Ava struggles with the most. Visitors are asked to complete a simple code matching game in groups. With minimal instructions, they are forced to use their own teamwork skills to finish before the time is out.
Figure 4: Universal Gallery featuring Ava’s test interactive (Photo: Sia Duff)
Ava’s character is designed to consider the future of humans in space, as well as ethical issues surrounding human genetic engineering. However, future skills such as collaboration are similarly important and this was our focus for Ava’s interior driver. In recent years, Atlassian has re-thought the way that they reviewed employees, shifting away from “brilliant jerk” technically skilled workers to those who could also demonstrate that they are living the company’s core values (Chee, 2019). Similarly, Andy Koronios, CEO and Managing Director of SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre, spoke with MOD. about the importance of collaboration and teamwork in future industries. Unlike three hundred years ago, it’s impossible today for any one human to know everything that humans know. To explore complex technologies like Ava does, Koronios explains that we need people who can share their knowledge to collaborate and work towards goals (Koronios, 2020).
Julia
Julia has noticed environmental changes and is concerned about what this means for Eucalara. Visitors meet Julia at a secret hideout, isolated and blocked from GPS systems, while they are packing a survival kit. Julia details the environmental changes that they have noticed and encourages visitors to select from three items from the display in the gallery to include in their own survival kit.
Figure 5: A visitor making choices for their survival kit with Julia’s introductory video in the background (Photo: Sia Duff).
The environmental changes that Julia is wary of were based on projections produced in the Australian Academy of Sciences Australia 2050 project, specifically research that details the adverse consequences that climate change will have on southern Australia in terms of temperature, agriculture and urban systems, water availability, incidence of drought and fire, increase in species extinction rates, and shifts in ecosystems (Fulton et al., 2012). These projections informed how we described Eucalara and Julia’s world, enabling us to communicate the most likely environmental changes facing southern Australia.
In a gallery with burned tree trunks, Julia encourages visitors to consider the future of climate adaptation and biodiversity. Despite their cynicism, Julia has hope. They are an active character in their story. Their personal sense of resilience is an important part of the narrative, and key to Julia’s story as their interior driver. It was also important to model a resilient future for our young adult target audience.
Luca
For Luca, the best use of the land at Eucalara is building an eco-marina, a small city embracing the best in sustainable urban design and architecture. Visitors are encouraged to look at the potential facilities for the site of Eucalara Bay and select the three most important ones.
Figure 6: Visitors choosing city facilities for Luca’s Marina (Photo: Sia Duff)
Luca’s interaction is designed to provide visitors with a view into what future cities might include. However, Luca’s drive to start the business and their sense of entrepreneurship are equally important in the interaction.
It’s clear from the videos that Luca’s drive to develop Eucalara Bay is less due to a passion for urban design, and more motivated by their keen entrepreneurial eye. For Luca, Eucalara Bay represents an option to start a business that will benefit many, partly by using sustainable products and design. This shifting purpose of entrepreneurship towards impact and social enterprise is something that we notice today with impact investing growing substantially in recent years (Michaux et al., 2020).
More broadly, the investment in entrepreneurship is currently being seen across Australia. In South Australia, the State and Federal Governments have both contributed funding to Lot Fourteen, a precinct dedicated to “innovation, entrepreneurship, research, education, culture, and tourism – to grow jobs and the South Australian economy” (Lot Fourteen, 2021). This site is part of a widespread shift in the investment of people who will create jobs for themselves, and others, rather than a more traditional vocational path (Zhao, 2012). As Zhao suggests (2012), we wanted to represent an alternative career path, beyond having a job, towards an entrepreneurial mindset asking what problems does the world need to solve, and how can they help to solve them?
Kai
Kai is heartbroken and writing poetry when visitors meet them. The siblings have submitted Kai as a contestant on the public transport system’s dating show, In Hyperlove With You. Visitors first buy a ticket, filling out a survey about their transport choices, and then board the hypertrain, where they can vote which contestant Kai should choose for a date.
Figure 7: Visitors watching In Hyperlove With You on the hypertrain in Kai’s space (Photo: Katie Edwards)
Kai’s story is one of the three that we changed based on consideration of their interior future. While Kai is designed to give visitors an experience of future transport, the dating story takes precedence. We gave Kai an interior driver of relationships and family to emphasize this. The dating show commences with a montage of diverse relationships and is followed by a content warning: relationships come in many shapes and sizes not depicted in the show. Kai then continues to discuss their family as an important part of their life.
A further design choice that came from these discussions about relationships was the choice to use they/them pronouns for all siblings. This choice stemmed from discussions at a LGBTIQ+ Inclusion Training session as part of Dr Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton’s work around Queering the Museum (Sullivan & Middleton, 2020). We wanted to demonstrate that gender has been understood differently over time, and that this will continue to shift. Additionally, we wanted to help visitors imagine that they are in a different time with different values and the use of these pronouns supported that. Across all accounts, our visitors appreciated this representation, and this design choice achieved its intentions.
Alex
Alex is a remote nurse, monitoring elderly patients who still live at home from a central location and dispatching medical attention as required. After discovering that great-grandmother hacked her health monitoring device and stopped wearing it in her final months, Alex is perplexed — why would anyone not want to constantly monitor their bodies? The visitor is tasked with exploring great-grandmother’s house to understand why.
Alex’s focus on the mystery of why great-grandmother would be concerned with the constant body monitoring provided rich discussions around the future of health care. We included ethics and privacy as the interior driver, referencing data storage and the body monitoring that we already use in the current day as points of reference.
Alex’s character has some brief mentions of his penchant for poker and gambling in some of the exhibition interactives. This story never gets told, and visitors are left to come to their own conclusion. The way that this story does not unfold is a further hint towards information that we consider public and private.
This story grew more relevant with the arrival of COVID-19, in particular when the Australian Government introduced a new Medicare item for telemedicine. When the exhibition re-opened after its COVID-19 closure, we updated the exhibition with a timeline of telemedicine. With advice from Associate Professor Saravana Kumar at the University of South Australia, we were able to include additional information in the gallery about other plausible future developments, including artificial intelligence for diagnosis and physician assistance.
Figure 8: Timeline of telemedicine installed in Alex’s interactive following reopening of the galleries after COVID-19 lockdown in South Australia, August 2020 (Photo: Kristin Alford).
Mia
After losing a job as a barista to a robot, Mia’s started a barber apprenticeship. Unfortunately, there’s growing robot competition in this field as well. Mia spends most of their time at work daydreaming of opening an organic restaurant with their partner, Naomi. Visitors are offered a seat and a free virtual haircut while they help Mia with a survey as part of their studies.
The survey and most of the exhibit focuses on changes to the workforce in the future due to Industry 4.0 and automation. However, while Industry 4.0 calls to mind manufacturing and logistics, Mia’s story situates these changes in the everyday. This is an environment that everyone is familiar with and helps to break down the mystery of Industry 4.0 and the effect of robotics in work.
Figure 9: Visitor at haircut and survey station in Mia’s Salon (Photo: Sia Duff)
Mia was the character we changed the most from the Helsinki original. The original character was focused on becoming model, talking at length about boutique fashion brands. After reports that the original character was criticized for being shallow and frivolous by Finnish visitors, we gave Mia interior drivers of seeking purpose and meaning, and used this to shape their character development within the exhibition.
Rowan
Rowan is a self-taught biohacker and scientist who we meet at work in their lab. After finally creating the world’s first completely synthetic and emission free hamburger, someone has hacked their computer and locked them out of their food machine. Visitors are required to perform escape room-style puzzles to figure out the password and unlock Rowan’s computer.
Figure 10: Detail of interactive for solving genetic puzzles in Rowan’s lab (Photo: Sia Duff)
Rowan’s focus is biotechnologies and future foods, and there are repeated references throughout other parts of the exhibition interactives about the hamburger they have created. However, we decided to emphasize their internal future of learning in our exploration of this character. We considered this important for our young target audience and used this as a basis to discuss online learning and the potential changes to the education system.
Rowan’s future of learning is linked to their core value of self-determination; their learning is self-driven and predominantly takes place online. This relates to their identity as an Aboriginal person, which brings in the opportunity for discussion relating to different ways of knowing and learning. Emphasizing the importance of western and non-western ways of knowing is something that has been important to MOD. since its creation, and Rowan’s backstory provided an avenue to continue this discussion.
Drivers of Change
SEVEN SIBLINGS FROM THE FUTURE allowed us to present multiple drivers of change that might influence plausible futures for our audience. The core values of the siblings were based on a selection from ten cultural dimensions developed by Schwartz (1994) to compare cultures. A summary of the siblings’ core values, interior drivers and exterior drivers are included in Table 1.
Table 1: Summary of Core Values and Drivers of Change
| SIBLINGS | CORE VALUES | INTERIOR DRIVERS | EXTERIOR DRIVERS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ava | Stimulation | Collaboration | Space, human genetic modification |
| Julia | Safety | Resilience | Climate change and biodiversity |
| Luca | Accomplishment | Entrepreneurship | Cities |
| Kai | Equality | Relationships and Family | Sustainable transport |
| Alex | Benevolence | Ethics and Privacy | Healthcare and telemedicine |
| Mia | Pleasure | Purpose and Meaning | Robotics and automation |
| Rowan | Freedom and self-determination | Learning | Biotechnologies and future foods |
The siblings’ cultural identities were informed by considering First Nations and waves of migration to Australia since early colonisation. This couple with the they/them pronouns and hints about diverse sexual identity allowed for conversations about how we might understand self-identity in the future. In addition, the setting of Eucalara allowed for conversations about land use and climate change. In this way, each siblings, plus their cultural identities and the setting of Eucalara allowed for a range of drivers of future change to be considered by visitors throughout the exhibition.
Impact and Effectiveness
SEVEN SIBLINGS FROM THE FUTURE was on display and open to the public for eight months. Over this time, we surveyed almost 900 visitors, finding 86% of respondents rated their experience as excellent or outstanding.
These visitor surveys were followed by specific evaluation that aligned with that conducted in Finland. This research reached 82 visitors, and showed that the world building of this exhibition was key to visitor enjoyment, but also was vital to the messages that visitors left with. 78% of visitors agreed that the character videos were important in engaging them in the exhibition. Moreover, 92% of surveyed visitors agreed that these personal stories were an effective way of communicating these plausible futures. It is reasonable to suggest that the impact of these people, these characters, and their interior and exterior drivers were fundamental to visitors’ understanding of futures research. We found that after a visit, 57% of visitors were determined to change their individual actions to create a better future.
This is a sentiment that we encouraged in the final gallery, and we learned a lot about how visitors felt after their visit through responses to the question “what can you do now to create a better future?” Visitors were encouraged to respond with words or drawings and display these in the final gallery. The responses were varied. Many visitors advocated for better waste management and recycling. There were frequent calls to taking up a plant-based diet. Many visitors left messages encouraging diversity and inclusion.
However, over the course of the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires, the peg board turned orange. There was an overwhelming outpouring of support for firefighters, calls for donations, and political commentary. It was clear that our visitors could see a connection between the themes of the exhibition and what they were currently experiencing. They could see that their actions directly impacted the future, that we are all responsible. Beyond this, visitors could see that they each have agency to make a difference, whether it be something on an individual level, like not driving a car, or something on a broader level, through voting and protest. This combination of agency combined with the encouraging and positive messages suggests that our visitors are hopeful and empowered about the future (Morrow, 2006).
Figure 11: Feedback board from visitors in the weeks following the Australian bushfires, January 2020 (Photo: Natalie Carfora)
Conclusion
The exhibition format was key to helping our visitors grapple with futures. By immersing visitors into a specific future world, we were able to build up a story around them. The narrative structure of the seven siblings, combined with the interactive exhibits, allowed us to consider complex drivers for the future. This interplay of interior and exterior drivers made for a rich exploration of a plausible future of Australia, and left visitors feeling empowered that they each had a role to play in it.
MOD., University of South Australia, Australia
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