​Hosted by the Lab for Radical Museum Futures, RADAR, and Green Room

​This one's a RADAR signal in physical form: the museum that becomes something else. We keep tracking a pattern of institutions that shed the vitrine and the wall text — a bank that became an arthouse, and now a landmark Great Hall that spends its summer as a playground instead of an exhibit hall. We'll spend an afternoon inside THE PLAYGROUND, Snarkitecture's monumental takeover of the National Building Museum's Great Hall — nine activation areas built from plywood, scaffolding, and the other unglamorous materials that hold our buildings up, reassembled here into something you're invited to climb, dig into, and get lost in. It's not a museum exhibit about play. It's play, staged at the scale of a landmark interior, and it has something to teach anyone who has ever tried to design an experience that asks people to move rather than just look.

Part of Museum and the Computer Network Annual Conference

Museum technologists work in ecotones — the biological term for transition zones where two ecosystems meet, like where forest gives way to meadow. Ecotones are the most biodiverse and most generative zones in nature. Yet, also the most precarious. Museum digital work lives on exactly this kind of edge: between conservation and innovation, between the tech sector's velocity and museums’ slower cycles of change. What happens in ecotones directly impacts the heart of an ecosystem: edge activities can augment institutional capacity to adapt and survive in rapidly evolving conditions. Sustainability, in this context, is not green-IT compliance. It is the question of how museum workers can keep showing up in the in-between. Human sustainability is what institutional longevity depends on. In museums, we talk about long-term stewardship of collections, platforms, and knowledge, but rarely about long-term stewardship of the people doing that work. A technologist who stays in the field across decades, who carries institutional memory, who maintains trust with their colleagues and their public — that person is a longevity infrastructure.

This 45-minute Imagination Bootcamp explores sustainability in the in-between by taking the conference hotel itself as material. Hotels are liminal by design — full of people in transit, between homes, between meetings, neither here nor there. They are also stacked with overlooked ecotones: lobby thresholds, service corridors, and, in this case, a green roof where infrastructure meets living systems. This experiential session invites participants to use the metaphor of ecotones as a way of imagining new dynamics and structures for digital museum work. We will move through a short somatic warm-up that tunes awareness of immediate surroundings, a site-based practice that connects us to generations of workers and guests who have moved through this building, and a small-group exercise that extends attention to the more-than-human world sharing the space with us.

The Bootcamp draws on participants’ lived experience, futures literacy, and embodiment. Dr. Marina Gross-Hoy's research into museum professional ecosystems as ecotones — sites of cross-sectoral collaboration shaped by the fundamental paradox between conservation and communication – is the foundation. Imagination is trained here like a muscle: through attention, body, and place, rather than through forecast or scenario.

Participants will leave with a felt sense of their own ecotones, a small artifact from the session, and an imagination practice they can carry into their work. The Bootcamp is designed for technologists who suspect that the most urgent infrastructure question is not which platform to adopt next, but how to remain imaginative, embodied, and trustworthy across the long arc of institutional change.

No previous experience with somatic practice, futures methods, or speculative design is required. Comfortable shoes for walking are recommended.