What is The Museum of Future Water?

2024 scholarship awardee update

By Stephanie Rosestone

Learning Facilitator, Designer and Researcher and 2024 Vic Hub Drought Resilience Scholarship Awardee

Visit The Museum of Future Water exhibition between 11 April to 9 May 2025

You can learn more about the 2024 Vic Hub Drought Resilience Scholarship Awardees here

Find out more about Stephanie’s scholarship work

The Museum of Future Water (MOFW) is an exhibition running at the Mooroopna Education & Activity Centre in northern Victoria. It is also a bigger idea, one that I hope to grow – watch this space!

The MOFW is a collection of Participatory Possitopian Futures about water. A place to share speculative ideas, stories and objects that challenge dominant and narrow utopian or dystopian narratives. It provokes critical and creative thinking about what futures we are creating in the present, where our imagination about the future comes from and who holds power over those future imaginings and creations. It also asks us to consider how we can collaborate to weave many different possible futures together.

Water is a critical and shared part of all life. In Victoria (and Australia), water is a valuable resource that is facing increasing pressures from extremes – drought and flood – that will create further tensions around use and management. This exhibition seeks to start new conversations about futures to create, avoid and adapt to.

In the exhibition you will see:

• A collection of 36 bottles of imagined future water from the year 2050, most have created by the local community during futures thinking workshops. They are ‘Messages in a Bottle’ from the future.  There are also empty bottles with ‘messages yet to arrive’ and an invitation for more people to contribute.
• The ‘Where do you stand?’ activity for visitors to leave a mark to show on how they view the future of water and their agency.  Based on the work of US-based experiential futurist Stuart Candy and futures practitioner, lecturer, facilitator and Futurepod co-host Peter Hayward.
• A collection of AI-generated images using DALL·E 3. Prompts were drawn from public vision statements about water. The images ask visitors to consider where these (predominately techno-utopian) ideas come from and if they are futures we desire.
• A participatory tapestry where visitors can weave their futures together. The tapestry includes both unravelling pasts and presents and a broad cone of future possibilities that visitors can grow together.
• A giant bottle where visitors are invited to contribute their own message on a scroll, by imagining “How can the water in the future be better?”

Part of my PhD project, the MOFW is an exploration of methods to enable participation in decision making that enables and restricts different futures, through broad collaboration and participation. This exhibition is ‘testing the waters’ (so to speak!) in methods that create space for this kind of collaboration to begin and grow.

Inspiration for this project was drawn from the creative minds of others. My thanks to UK-based artist Amy Sharrocks for designing an accessible participatory concept – Museum of Water – a fantastic idea that I have built on, stretching it into the future. Also to Bridget McKenzie (Climate Museum UK) for introducing me to the concept of a Possitopian approach to futures, a great way to explain the necessity of complex, flexible and just future-making.

Thanks to support from the Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption & Innovation Hub, with support from the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund; ANU Institute for Water Futures; Australian Research Council; and Shepparton Arts Festival Inc.

The exhibition is open 9am-3pm, Monday-Friday at 23 Alexandra Street, Mooroopna, until Friday 9^th May.    

If you’re interested in knowing more or helping this idea grow, please reach out to me.