Industrial design, artificial intelligence, and the transformation of cultural systems — agentic AI, spatial computing, and museums as distributed interpretive systems.
What This Site Is
Arguments about museums and what they owe the public.
Long-form pieces on museum governance, public trust, cultural policy, the future of the field, and the forces reshaping it — AI, demographics, politics, and funding structures.
Practical knowledge drawn from forty museum projects.
Exhibition design, cost benchmarks, feasibility frameworks, starting a museum from scratch. The evergreen content that practitioners and boards actually use — built since 2007.
Two published books. A third in development.
Museums 101 and Designing Museum Experiences, both from Rowman & Littlefield / AAM Press. Written from practice, not theory.
Fifteen years of posts on every dimension of the field.
Over 400 articles across exhibition design, museum planning, governance, types of museums, future trends, and the business of running a cultural institution.
museumplanner.org is Mark Walhimer's intellectual home — the place where thinking about museums happens in public. It is separate from museumplanning.com, the consulting firm, by design.
The consulting firm is where you hire Mark to plan a museum. This site is where you find out how he thinks about museums — the arguments, the frameworks, the disagreements with the field, the things worth caring about. Both are real. They serve different purposes and different readers.
Recent Writing
How museums survive the next three years — a strategic response to the structural pressures reshaping American cultural institutions.
A new body of research reveals a fundamental shift in how Gen Z relates to physical space — with direct implications for how museums design for presence, attention, and meaning.
As the world enters a period of sustained psychological difficulty, museums must shift from explaining history to actively caring for the public's mind and soul in the age of AI.
What the One Big Beautiful Bill Act means for the public-private partnership that has sustained American museums for decades.
The deliberate transformation of the U.S. from global policeman to imperial fortress — and what it means for cultural institutions built on openness and exchange.
How AI, IoT, and agentic systems are creating "Museums Everywhere" — and why planning a building without planning an audience system is now incomplete.
For the first time in thirty years in museums, a hesitation before writing — and what that cooling effect means for institutions built on public trust.
Content Areas