To create more inclusive museums, we must change our basic mindset and emulate aspects of institutions, like libraries and shopping malls, that a large cross-section of our citizenry deem essential. Museums would have to appreciate, respect, and facilitate each visitor’s individual quest and applaud a broad set of motivations for coming in off the street.

Objects, with their many possible interpretations, would be presented in such a way that their multiple meanings can be both applied and extracted simultaneously by people on varying informational or aesthetic quests independent from what the objects’ curator intends them to learn or know.

This vision turns museums upside down, transferring authority to the visitor and transforming the staff from knowledge accumulators, preservers, and translators into knowledge brokers and sharers. Some museums have experimented with bits and pieces of this role reversal in the past. I am confident that it could, and should be, adopted wholesale in the future.