 The museum’s new Send Me SFMOMA project—which sends works from its 34,678-piece collection to anyone in the world via text message. The project can be considered Send Me as an SMS service that provides an approachable, personal, and creative method of sharing the breadth of SFMOMA’s collection with the public. It was designed to generate personal connections to the museum in a world oversaturated with information. |  How can collections be used to empower people, be made relevant to different communities and be made more dynamic and responsive to changing expertise and knowledge? The Museums Association (MA) has launched Collections 2030, a major new research project that seeks to understand the current state of museum collections in the UK, and identify how to make the most of museum collections over the course of the next decade. This discussion paper helps to envision the future of museums. |  “One Step Away” is a collaboration where participant storytellers directed development of the exhibition. Personal objects and individual testimonies make up the exhibition, and each is an account of lived experience with homelessness. Visitors are encouraged to play a game called "Perspective," where everyone begins with different resources, abilities, and privileges that inform our life choices. |
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 How do we research into an object's stories? In the early 20th century, suffragettes who bought these tea services could use them as propaganda tools in a bid to convert their ‘anti’ neighbours. This particular tea set even tells us about a lesser known suffragette, Rose Lamartine Yates, who held fundraising tea parties for the campaign. |  What are museums for? Who have a say about what the museum looks like? At the V&A Museum of Childhood we have been experimenting with the co-design process to explore how our visitors might impact on the architectural evolution of the building, inspired by their desired and imagined engagement with its spaces. |  How can community collaboration be embedded in museum practices? How can museums work with audiences to shape their exhibitions? In collaboration with residents from Birmingham, this exhibition, "Within and Without: Body Image and the Self" was curated to think critically about representation of body image and who constructs the standards of beauty. |
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 It’s so important for museums to be a local place intertwined and inseparable from local realities and issues. We are located in our communities, but we’re also a part of those communities. How do we, as museum professionals, define our place, our town, our city, our neighborhood, our community? |  Museums and cultural organizations are constantly being asked how effectively we’re serving our communities and how well we represent our community. Who are we talking about? |  We all belong to many communities, some that we define for ourselves and some that are defined for us. Our participation in certain communities might be deep, long-term, and really meaningful to us, while our involvement in other communities might be fairly thin and insignificant. How would museums see their positions within the communities and make a difference to the place that everyone belongs? |
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