imagining the future – SAP’s Ideathon 2020

Today I opened and SAP University Alliances Ideathon – 21 teams around the world spending a weekend addressing critical world challenges – [Link] For future world building, I made the case for using a toolkit that we are calling creative pragmatics, a kind of next-generation design thinking.

Update – the actuality of the archaeological past

I have contributed little to this site Since 2016. I have been writing (Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity [Link]), running experiments in fieldwork (Project Borderlands [Link]), exploring applied archaeology (with a host of organizations and corporations), asking questions of the proper role of the academic, the researcher, the scholar. In this contemporary…

the future of the museum

The new Collections Depot for Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam is under construction. I visited a couple of weeks ago and had a chat with Sjarel Ex, Director of Boijmans. This is opening the doors of the museum and gallery in a new way – all 150,000 items in the collection will be…

Update – Summer 2017

July 2017. While over the last few months I’ve neglected posting my ideas, thoughts, news and commentary here at mshanks.com, I’ve had a fascinating series of encounters with some wonderful people, organizations and businesses. And I am preparing some posts – I greatly value the process of logging this learning journey I am so lucky…

strategic foresight|design thinking – online course

Today we launched our new online class with Stanford Continuing Studies – [Link]. Strategic Foresight and Design Thinking Here’s how Tamara (Carleton) and I describe what we have to offer: “We live in an interconnected world where the old answers don’t seem to apply, where even successful businesses need to embrace radical change, where global…

update – summer 2016

The book on Greece and Rome with Gary (Devore) [Link] is close to being done. We’ve chosen to offer a quite different kind of account of antiquity and we’re delighted with the scope of its underlying model and perspective (archaeological and focused on the topic of membership of body politic). It’s the success of our…