If you’ve seen images of the Museum of the Future in Dubai, you’ll know that it’s something from out of this world.
Brendan McGetrick, the creative director of Museum of the Future, came to Austin, Texas, with a traveling exhibit for the first time recently to share the vision for the museum, which takes you on a journey to the future of 50 years from now. In an exhibit at SXSW 2025, the museum gave people a taste of its innovations in visual technology. I spoke with him about the vision and what he expects to happen in the future.
Previously, he was founding director of Global Grad Show, an annual exhibition of graduate projects from the world’s leading design and technology schools. In 2014, he curated Fair Enough in the Russian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. As a writer, designer and curator, McGetrick’s work has appeared in publications around the world.
Dubai Future Foundation, the museum creator, hosted an immersive experience in Austin. I hope to make it to the real museum — a seven-story cultural landmark in Dubai — one day. It takes people to the year 2071 and presents the vision for the intersection of Middle Eastern futurism and Western tech culture. It paints a picture on how desert innovations could inform climate adaptation globally — much like the sci-fi epic Dune.
We had a wide-ranging conversation about the future. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: How long has this been a project for you?
Brendan McGetrick: A little more than six years. I joined in January 2019.
GamesBeat: Was that before it opened?
McGetrick: Yes, we opened in February 2022. I joined when the building was under construction, but we were still very much figuring out the concept of what the museum would be and building the team.
GamesBeat: You don’t get to do this kind of thing very often. It’s a unique museum. What was that experience like?
McGetrick: It was challenging, but an exciting challenge. 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. We spent a lot of time figuring out what we’d like the experience to be, what kind of future we’d like to present to people, and how we’d like people to feel when they’re in the museum. All of that was challenging, but in the best possible way.
GamesBeat: What did you choose to focus on to find your path?
McGetrick: Certain things made it easy to find that path. Because it was an initiative of the Dubai government, we knew their policy priorities and areas of engagement, particularly when it comes to the future. That shaped the choices we made around the subjects we were going to talk about, the perspectives and the vision of the future the leadership of Dubai is working toward. We dramatized it, in a way, and found a way to universalize it. We knew our audience would be from everywhere. We wanted to tell a story or present a vision of the future that was rooted in Dubai’s values and interests, but also spoke to a much broader experience.
That was one of the main guiding lights. Another one was just the kind of experience we wanted to provide. We decided very early we wanted to be an immersive experience, where you were visiting future environments. It isn’t an exhibition about the future as much as futures you can explore and feel a part of. We knew that would be our interpretation early on, so we worked toward making it as convincing as possible.
GamesBeat: What technologies became the most useful as you put this together?
McGetrick: Of course we used all the display technologies that you would typically use: projection, spatial audio, things that are responsive to movement. But in the end it’s not really technology-driven. It’s more story-driven. We reference technologies like AI and synthetic biology, things we know will shape the future, and we present them in a way that helps people understand their potential. But a lot of the techniques for achieving the museum are more borrowed from film, set design, things like that, rather than things like AR or VR, which may be futuristic, but don’t really translate for a big project like ours that has thousands of people every day.
GamesBeat: Do you have any stats that are interesting for giving people more perspective on this?
McGetrick: We’ve been sold out every day since we opened, three years straight. We get something like 1.3 million visitors a year. A really interesting stat is that 30% of our visitors have never been to a museum before. The visitors have come from something like 177 countries. It’s a super broad audience, culturally and experientially. Some people are futurists and experts on the subject. Some come with no expectations at all. One of the challenges is how to speak to such a broad audience in a way that meaningfully touches them.
GamesBeat: I imagine sustainability is a big theme here. How to live on Earth without destroying it.
McGetrick: We have a whole floor about applying sciences like AI and synthetic biology to begin repairing damage we’ve done to the natural world. Three of the exhibition floors take place in the year 2071. We’re already on a timeline assuming climate change, assuming the effects of climate change, which is ecosystem collapse and mass extinction. If that’s the case, on the other side of that, how can we begin applying these technologies that are just emerging now, but will be much more advanced in 50 years, to begin repairing our relationship to the natural world? In a more meaningful and healthy way, understanding that we can affect nature, but we should do it in a sensitive, positive way, as opposed to just doing whatever we want.
GamesBeat: Do you touch on something like gaming?
McGetrick: One of our floors is for children, 10 and below. In that one we borrowed a lot from game experiences. Not from video game visuals or screen-based experiences – it’s all physical things – but we gamified it in the sense that you choose an avatar, and the things you do–you collect badges if you successfully do one of the games. You have to collaborate. You’re trying to build future proof skills of collaboration and creativity and communication. We tried to take what makes games so compelling and interesting for people, but then apply it to a physical experience, so that you’re not just sitting there looking at a screen. You’re using your body and being physical. At the same time, you’re learning from what’s so interesting about gamified experiences.
GamesBeat: Do you look at gaming and extrapolate it to something like a metaverse, or the idea of virtual life?
McGetrick: We don’t have a digital twin of the experience, partly because we feel dedicated to rewarding people for being physically there. We have a very multisensory experience. 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. None of that stuff translates to a metaverse experience. Maybe in the future we could explore it, but as we were originally conceiving it, we wanted to keep it very much in the physical world.
GamesBeat: Would you compare it to something like the Sphere in Las Vegas?
McGetrick: What we have in common with the Sphere is that the building itself is captivating to people. It makes them very curious about what’s going on inside the building. The Sphere is a kind of new standard for what is possible in a mediated environment, a media-defined environment. For us, we try to be less screen-based. We’re using a lot of physical objects, playing with light and things like that. I like the Sphere in the sense that it pushes people forward to do new and interesting things.
The other thing about the Sphere that I think is great, and we’re trying to develop this further, is that it’s collective. It’s a space for collective experiences. We’re trying to make the journey through the museum more collective, recognizing that people who come to museums now–it’s very rarely an individual. It’s a small group of friends or family. They want to have a collective experience. They also sometimes want to feel like they’re in a big group of people doing something. All these things are inspiring for us. We’re trying to incorporate them.
GamesBeat: Do you try to cover different industries, like transportation or medicine?
McGetrick: Kind of? Three of the floors are thematic. One is about space. One is about the environment and ecology. The other is about health. Within those we cover a number of different industries. Below that we have a technology showcase floor. That floor is thematic as well. We have a transportation section, an urban design section, an energy section, things like that. We can’t cover everything, but we try to cover as much as we can.
GamesBeat: Is the museum complete, or do you still have more expansion happening?
McGetrick: Not expansion, but we’re in the process of redesigning all the exhibits. We’ll replace them. That’s the evolution that needs to happen, and one of the challenges of the museum. Everyone’s always asking, “What else you got?” It’s exciting now, because we’re looking at what we’ve done critically and thinking about how we can do things better. What have we learned from our audience? That sort of thing.
GamesBeat: I’m always writing about fun new technologies. Light Field Lab is one I’ve seen recently, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. Do you see things like that coming along to change museum technology?
McGetrick: The should. One of our insights is that the way something is displayed affects how much people look at it. If it’s just linear media on a big screen, we’ve been surprised to see how much people don’t engage with that. When you have an original medium or way of presenting something, people are surprised by it. That’s enough to make them stop and ask, “What’s actually happening here?” Things like Light Field are really exciting for us, because they allow us to expand our ways of presentation.
The future is unknown, undefined. Our big challenge, in a way, isn’t to predict the future, but to find ways to make people care about the future. For that we need to change things up. Certain things really speak to people, while other things speak to them less. How do we be good communicators and provide enough inspiration that people can then leave the museum and go about their lives and make their own choices? That’s the main point. The future matters, and you matter to the future. Please think about what you want to do.
GamesBeat: Do you feel that you’re giving warnings to people about the future?
McGetrick: If anything, what we’re trying to do is identify things that are legitimate concerns now, but rather than turning those into some dystopian future – which a lot of TV and movies and novels do – we’re trying to say that climate change is a real thing. Space is a competition. Military competition, economic competition, these are real things that are emerging. Our health floor is about information overload and technology dependence. These are all real challenges that could go a lot of different ways. Our museum exists to say that with the right interventions and the right values, these could become positive things. That’s the way we should be channeling our energy and our imagination.
We are warning people, in a way, but not in a way that’s meant to scare them. We know from museum studies and exhibition studies that those things are pacifying for people. It doesn’t inspire them to do anything. It just makes them feel like they can’t do anything. We’re trying to provide warnings that empower. This is a warning, but this is not inevitable. We can go in a different way.
GamesBeat: I remember Michio Kaku’s book on the future. There was an interesting passage where he talked about how we have to figure out immortality first, and then we can figure out space travel, once we’re able to live long enough to do it. It makes perfect sense.
McGetrick: He came to the museum, actually, and spoke there. Certain people, certain cultures, they think and talk a lot about the future. One of the things we’re trying to do is expand the number of people and the number of cultures that are contributing to the conversation. Interpreting what a future could be.
We get a lot of feedback, and we take it seriously. Our ambition was never to be predicting or forecasting the future. We’re showing possible futures and stimulating conversation, things like that. When people come with a different interpretation or expectation, we embrace that. We talk about that and see if we can harmonize these things.
GamesBeat: Did you have a particular mission in coming here to SXSW?
McGetrick: It’s our first activation outside of Dubai, outside of the museum. We thought this seemed like the kind of place that has a similar spirit. It’s very multidisciplinary. It brings people together from different fields and different cultures. It has an optimistic, or at least experimental philosophy. That’s certainly where we come from. We’ve spent all this time defining what we think about the future and the kind of conversations we want to have. Maybe now it’s interesting to begin introducing those conversations and perspectives outside. It’s been super gratifying.
We’ve had a great response. The talks have been very well-attended. A lot of interesting questions and conversations have come out of them. We’ve met a lot of interesting people. For us it’s been great, because you always hope for the best, but you never know the first time you do something. It’s been gratifying for us and we’re happy we did it.
The post How do you design a Museum of the Future? | Brendan McGetrick interview appeared first on Venture Beat.
