The Backstory of How Dubai’s Museum of the Future Was Imagined Is Worth Reading

Thirty percent of the visitors to the Museum of the Future in Dubai have never been to a museum before. That’s just one of the fascinating insights that emerge from this interview VentureBeat did with the museum’s creative director Brendan McGetrick about the inspiration and creation of the immersive experiences that are inside the museum. I was lucky to visit for the first time back in January and even as someone who has been to many museums and spends a lot of time thinking about and talking about the future, many elements of the experience stayed with me. From the way that a possible future library of genetic materials from all living things on Earth might look to the way the museum imagines sustainability of the future as regenerative ideas to repair the damage to the environment we are currently inflicting, the concepts were original and unexpected.

As McGetrick describes, the original challenge was daunting: “We had to figure out what a museum of the future even is. That’s exciting because you don’t have any references to draw from, really. You have a lot of freedom to interpret.” Choosing to focus on immersion so people could experience what the future might really look like was one of their earliest guiding principles. As he also notes, “we put a lot of time and thought into the nature of audio, the nature of scent. We have five or six different scents that we made specifically for the museum. Part of that is just to remind people that even in this digitized age, in the end your senses are the original technology, and we should try to use them as much as possible.”