by Brooke Ferguson, Dr Dylan DeLosAngeles & Dr Kristin Alford
Part 1: Introduction
MOD.
Located within Adelaide University, MOD. (Museum of Discovery) is a future-focused, interactive museum working at the intersection of science, art, and innovation in South Australia. Through its dynamic annual exhibitions, the museum showcases how research shapes our understanding of the world to inform, imagine and create possible futures.
BROKEN was MOD.’s 2024 exhibition. It spanned eight galleries, explored six complex systems and welcomed over 85,000 visitors. The exhibition facilitated experiences for visitors to practice creating alternative and hopeful futures, imagine multiple pathways towards those futures, and, importantly, realise the agency they had to take steps towards the ones they preferred, without ignoring the challenges embedded in such an ambitious undertaking. This framework of goals, pathways and agency was based on Hope Theory (Snyder, et al., 1991) and was designed to leave visitors with an increased ability to become hopeful actors in the present to work towards individual and collective preferred futures.
Structure
Following these introductory remarks, part 2 of this text presents the origins of BROKEN, walks through the exhibition itself, and shares how different visitors responded to it. Part 3 covers the theories that underpin the exhibition in more detail, and explores what was learned through its year-long operation.
Part 2: BROKEN
BROKEN’s origins
MOD. exists within a global cohort of futures-oriented cultural institutions that help people build their futures thinking capability. As a leader in this emerging field MOD. engages in experimental practices to broaden the tools available to engage the public in futures. One of these is the Future Themes Forum, a participatory futures process with MOD.’s community stakeholders (Carfora et al., 2024). At the 2022 forum, the community expressed frustration and distress with the current condition of large-scale systems and challenges like climate change, housing, education, and democracy.
When faced with such overwhelming global issues, people can experience a sense of powerlessness that leads to disengagement from collective action, perpetuating the situation and related dissatisfaction. Understanding how to cultivate active hope in these circumstances becomes crucial for maintaining motivation in the face of these complex challenges.
BROKEN sought to build this hope, by bringing together Snyder’s Hope Theory, which outlines setting goals, imagining pathways and building agency as essential skills, with scenario thinking and experiential futures to create an experience for visitors to explore multiple alternative futures and come out feeling more hopeful in their ability to shape and navigate such possibilities (Snyder, et al., 1991).
BROKEN
BROKEN consisted of interactive and immersive representations of alternative near-future systems accompanied by ‘What if?’ provocations, e.g., ‘What if we put nature first?’ or ‘What if learning meant more?’ It covered 8 gallery spaces with a set pathway for the visitors. This next section will take you along that same pathway from onboarding to offboarding and everything in between, enabling you to understand the exhibition journey for BROKEN.
Gallery 1: Onboarding
Tokens
As visitors entered the first gallery, they each collected a uniquely coded token (Figure 1).
Figure 1: BROKEN Tokens (Photography: TopBunk)
These tokens were carried throughout the exhibition and used to answer multiple-choice questions that related to each gallery’s theme at token stations (Figures 1 & 2). These interactions prompted thought and conversation about other future possibilities. This multiple-choice interactive layer built the visitor’s ability to reflect on what their preferred future goals were and imagine multiple pathways to get there.
Figure 2: BROKEN Token Station (Photography: Sia Duff)
Introductory film
As visitors entered the first gallery, they encountered an introductory film narrated by Ashum Owen, a Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri and Narungga woman from South Australia. It introduced the themes of the exhibition and contextualised it in time and place (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Introductory film inside the first gallery (Photography: Sia Duff)
The short film reflected on injustices that humanity has experienced in the past, while highlighting our ability to overcome them, e.g., child labour was justified, women weren’t allowed to vote, and the stolen generation was perpetuated, but through collective actions, these systems changed for the better. At the end of the film, visitors were invited to answer their first token station question: ‘How do you feel about the future… Defeated, Cynical, Optimistic or Excited?’
Gallery 2: Nature and Country
In the next gallery, visitors were asked, ‘What if we put nature first?’ An interactive world-building digital game called Terra Nil was displayed on touchscreens around three walls of the gallery (Figure 3) with related content projected on the walls above.
Figure 3: What if we put nature first? (Photography: Sia Duff)
Terra Nil guided players to develop infrastructure to regenerate a barren wasteland into a biodiverse paradise teeming with animals, plants, and waterways. The game flipped the traditional narratives of many city-building games, which often focus on building infrastructure for the benefit of humans.
Hanging in the centre of the space was a large, suspended sphere with content projected onto its surface. The Science on a Sphere allowed visitors to explore various visualisations of global datasets related to how humans are both a part of, and have considerable influence over, the configuration of our planet. Through exploring this gallery, visitors were prompted to think about how we design our cities, streets and towns, and how we might better design them for the benefit of plants, animals and future generations. Connected to this gallery was the permanent digital interactive named Kurru Kari, which explored seasonal Kaurna stories told by Storyteller and Artist Karl ‘Winda’ Telfer from the Mullawirra Meyunna.
Figure 4: Kurru Kari Seasonal Stories (Photo Credit MonkeyStack)
Gallery 3: Long-term Collaboration
The third gallery invited visitors to add a mathematically unique hat-shaped sticker (Conover, 2023) to a tessellated outline graphic covering the entire gallery whilst pondering: ‘What if we all stuck together?’ This gallery-sized sticker puzzle facilitated a long-term, collaborative project between strangers, where the contributors did not see the end result of their contribution (Figure 5).
Figure 5: What if we all stuck together? (Photography: Topbunk)
This exhibit enabled visitors to contribute to something bigger than themselves, with the hope that other visitors would do the same for the benefit of a positive future outcome. This was a metaphor for how we might work on other long-term projects with others, despite not fully knowing the possible outcomes of the work and the people contributing. We know this kind of collaboration is crucial in instances such as researching mathematical shapes, introducing new medical treatments, or making a difference in climate change. Despite the possibility of projects not seeing results for years, collaboration requires a high degree of shared ambition and collective action to bring them into fruition.
Gallery 4: Universal Basic Services
In the foyer space, large, illuminated metal column sculptures hung from the ceiling, viewable from both the ground and first floor (Figure 6). Small symbols cut into each column represented different services such as aged care, health care, and energy.
Figure 6: What if we spent it your way? (Photography: Sia Duff)
The installation asked visitors to ponder ‘What if we spent it your way?’. A touchscreen interface adjacent to the sculpture to determine how much they believe these sectors should be publicly, privately, or volunteer funded. A comparison showed how these sectors were currently funded within South Australia, prompting visitors to think about the sources of our funding and what it tells us about how we value goods and services as a society.
Gallery 5: Housing
The next gallery upstairs introduced a speculative organisation, Housing for Humans (Figure 7), which explored an alternative housing system where living spaces weren’t linked to ownership or investment.
Figure 7: What if no one owned a home? (Photography: Sia Duff)
This exhibit asked the question: ‘What if no one owned a home?’ and incorporated Australian Aboriginal frameworks of custodianship, socialist perspectives on housing, and an exploration of differing cultural and family practices. It weighed up the different tradeoffs that come with communal spaces, such as privacy, location, and environmental impacts, seeking not to be dogmatic over what is wrong or right but instead provide people the space to ponder or discuss their own values, priorities and preferences. It was in this gallery particularly that issues around audience perceptions of the intent of the exhibition could be confused as to whether we were presenting predictions or preferences for futures, rather than expanding possibilities. This is discussed in the later section.
Gallery 6: Representative Democracy
This large gallery was divided in half to present two ideas centred on representative democracy, ‘What if the future had a voice?’ and ‘What if we all had a say?’
What if the future had a voice?
The first space invited visitors to hear from five speculative government officials, called the Time Commissioners. Each Commissioner was responsible for advocating a particular timeframe, i.e., immediate, and in 6, 20, 100 and 60,000 years (Figure 8).
Figure 8: What if the future had a voice? (Photography: Sia Duff)
The Time Commissioners exhibit emerged from thinking about Elise Boulding’s 200-year present, The Future Generations commissioner in Wales, and the Children’s Commissioners in Australian states. The concept posed alternative mechanisms to hold governments responsible for thinking over perspectives of time that are often overlooked in our current short-term political and economic decision-making. By interacting with this exhibit, visitors could hear from each commissioner on a number of topics like justice, the environment, health, education, and technology in relation to their different focus timeframes.
What if we all had a say?
The second space was centred on including non-human forms of life in democratic decision-making processes. The Assembly of Trees, developed with experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats (Keats & Fox, 2024), considered how trees’ voting preferences could be determined by examining their health via canopy coverage. A large projected map of Adelaide and surrounding areas highlighted specific trees and their response to the passing of bills (Figure 9).
Figure 9: What if we all had a say? (Photography: Sia Duff)
While interrogating each tree and its measured levels of stress over time, visitors were invited to consider the coinciding bills proposed in the state government. This process aimed to stimulate discussions around how our democracy could become more inclusive by taking into account the effects our choices have on non-human entities with which we are inextricably linked.
Gallery 7: Learning
The second last gallery asked: ‘What if learning meant more?’ Here, visitors were invited to sit down and draw an image of something meaningful to them. These drawings were captured with a web camera and then released into a digitally projected landscape inspired by Yolŋu Country (Figure 10).
Figure 10: What if learning meant more? (Photography: TopBunk)
The exhibit was a collaboration between the Australian Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments (IVE) and Goŋ Wanhurr Aboriginal Art Corporation. It drew on two cultural concepts of learning. The first was from Charles Leadbeater, a British education innovator, who believed that the education of young people should focus less on following instructions and more on learning experiences that provide opportunities to use their knowledge to work together, develop personal strengths, and learn resilience. The second was on the importance of overlapping environmental, cultural, and spiritual values for Aboriginal people whilst managing the biodiversity of the land. While visitors drew and reflected on what skills and talents they have to help make a positive change in the world, they listened to reflections on learning from Yolŋu artist Tommy Riyakurray Munyarryun.
Gallery 8: Offboarding
The final gallery concluded the visitor’s journey, where three offboarding stations and a large projection provided an offboarding space. The projected visualisation of each visitor’s choices made with tokens during their exhibition journey reflected the multiple possible pathways to the future (Figure 11).
Figure 11: Offboarding stations and projection (Photography: Topbunk)
The logged choices that visitors made throughout the exhibition were tallied and categorised into one of five possible personas: disruptor, reflector, explorer, achiever or connector. This provided an opportunity for visitors to consider their own strengths and priorities, as well as those in their community, to create a sense of personal agency that is not in isolation from the different skills of the people around them.
Engagement Experience
The exhibition welcomed over 85,000 visitors and achieved multiple international awards, including the Winner of ICOM’s Cimuset Award, Winner of ASPAC’s Exhibition award and Highly Commended for Exhibiting Excellence by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association. This suggests that audiences are hungry for experiences that offer more than passive consumption of information about global challenges and collective futures.
Moderator (floor staff) observations and visitor survey feedback indicated that the exhibition achieved its primary goal of cultivating hope about the future for many. Comments we received such as “I love the ideas for change, they give me hope” and “it made me hopeful for the future” demonstrate that the methods successfully translated into meaningful experiences for those who engaged with BROKEN.
Although it cannot be said that every visitor left the exhibition with such a renewed sense of hope, for some, they either misunderstood what MOD. was intending to communicate or disagreed with our messages. One of the common misunderstandings was that we were advocating for or predicting particular futures rather than presenting possibilities. Many of these disagreements brought about rich discussion between visitors and the Moderators, leading to mutual learning and understanding. Through conversations, a middle-ground of understanding was found, with an agreement to disagree on what their preferred futures for these systems looked like, which was very valuable for all involved.
However, for some visitors, the ideas of BROKEN were presented in such a way that there was confusion over the intent of the show. BROKEN was created to spark discussions and further imaginings on alternative systems, although some visitors believed that we were instead presenting the ‘right’ or ‘predicted’ future. It reminds us as futures practitioners that it is always important to begin a futures activity with shared clarity on why futures are being discussed in relation to the activity, to avoid this confusion.
A few visitors strongly disagreed with the worldviews present in the alternatives as “leftist propaganda” and walked out after the first gallery on account of a perceived or true values clash. This is a point of learning. How do we create space for differing views to learn together to prevent the risk of ‘preaching to the choir’, without compromising the values of the team and institution?
It is worth reiterating that the visitors’ responses were overwhelmingly positive, with 75% of those surveyed citing the exhibition as excellent or outstanding. Some visitors were even moved to tears in the final gallery, before heading back into the world with a new sense of possibility for positive change.
Part 3 – Reflections
Hope theory
BROKEN was designed to develop hope by drawing on the work of many hope-based researchers. In particular, it built visitors’ capacity for envisioning diverse future scenarios (goals), while demonstrating that multiple routes exist for addressing challenges (pathways) and strengthening their belief in their power to influence outcomes (agency) based on Sydner at al.’s Hope Theory (1991). According to Sydner, Hope is defined as goal-directed energy consisting of three components:
- Goals (targets for action),
- Pathways (routes to achieve goals), and
- Agency (motivation and belief in one’s ability to use those pathways).
This kind of active or ‘realistic hope’ as described by Wilkinson & Flower (2018) can work to combat overwhelm and hopelessness. Furthermore, Eagleton, in his paper ‘Hope Without Optimism’ (2015), recognises that for hope to lead to change, it needs to be grounded in the uncomfortable, difficult realities of now. If we want to harness our power to re-create the large-scale systems we exist in, we must first recognise where we are and believe change is a possibility.
Skill One: Goals
In BROKEN, immersive representations of alternative near-future systems were presented alongside ‘What if?’ provocations, providing visitors with the space to ponder alternative futures. For example, Gallery 6 on Representative Democracy introduced visitors to hear from five speculative Time Commissioners and ponder how the preferences of non-human life forms could be incorporated into government decision-making processes. These alternative systems were presented not as ideal or preferred futures, but rather as possible alternatives to stimulate thought and discussion. This imagining of alternative futures expands visitors’ awareness of the future possibilities we face. By presenting these alternatives alongside the prompts “What if we all had a say?” and “What if the future had a voice?” visitors were invited to think about how our current systems could be reinvented, enabling them to imagine new aspirational ones worth setting goals towards.
Skill Two: Pathways
The token station questions in each gallery space prompted visitors to not only think about what kind of future they may prefer in relation to the system being explored in the space, but they also provided five possible pathways to get there. For example, in BROKEN’s gallery that focused on restoring nature and Country, the question ‘How might future city development put nature first?’ was posed. With these answers offered:
- ‘Make current infrastructure more efficient’
- ‘Protect pockets of biodiversity’
- ‘Implement net zero policies’
- ‘Require sustainable construction’
- ‘Consult First Nations Elders’.
This reminded visitors that there is more than one way to achieve an outcome.
The multiple-choice interactive layer worked to build the visitor’s ability to reflect on what their preferred future goals were and imagine multiple pathways to get there.
Skill Three: Agency
The final gallery included a visual representation of the pathway that a visitor had taken throughout the galleries, and placed this alongside the pathways of nearby visitors. Of course, the pathways of two visitors were very rarely the same, further enforcing the point that there is more than one way to achieve a desired future, whilst reminding the visitors that each person’s pathway is valuable and contributes towards larger collective change.
Conclusion
BROKEN’s approach offers tools to engage audiences in the active creation of more hopeful futures. The exhibition showed that by integrating hope theory principles, experiential scenarios, and guided questions/prompts, museums can foster the kind of imaginative thinking and personal agency that is required to address long-term systemic challenges. BROKEN demonstrated that when visitors left, they carried with them new cognitive tools and emotional resources necessary to more actively participate in shaping futures beyond the museum walls.
References
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