During the height of the pandemic, galleries and art museums across Canada had to go to great lengths to pivot from allowing visitors through their doors to reaching them through screens. In order for galleries to navigate immediate renewal and prepare for future opportunities and disruptions, Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries hosted a two-day professional development workshop, Re-imagining the sector: Galleries in a post-pandemic world.

Creative Futures was engaged to lead one of the sessions on Day 2 of the workshop, Looking to the Future, in order to provide an orientation to strategic foresight and discuss a range of future trends that may impact galleries in the future. 

Our Approach:

• Creative Futures designed a participatory session that fit into Day 2 of the overall agenda.

• Creative Futures provided an overview of strategic foresight and facilitated an interactive activity using specially curated future trend cards as a prompt for the discussion.

Results:

The participants of the professional development workshop imagined alternative possible futures for galleries and session participants told us that we provoked some serious thought. Several of the participants took the future trend cards with them, in hopes of replicating the exercise with their teams.