MUSEUMS AS CENTRES FOR INNOVATION

The museum is dead, long live the museum! The traditional museum is a vestige of a cultural collection system that housed physical artifacts steeped in the past and made them relevant to the present. Unfortunately over the past two decades the incredible accessibility, immediacy, and robustness of online resources have effectively replaced much of the information dispensed with in these historically central cultural institutions. As museums remain relevant as physical realms for experiencing and engaging curated displays and artifacts, they have also proactively been developing new programs and projects to ensure their long-term sustainability. Recent initiatives by a group of design students in Canada’s largest city have not only worked in tandem with local museums in refreshing this curatorial direction, but reframe the nature of such cultural institutions. From serving as a platform for leading edge technologies to showcasing emerging media artists, collaborations between museums and the local community hold the potential to ensure that they remain relevant as records of the past and present as well as instrumental innovative centres for future development.