How did the Museum of Tomorrow come about?
The proposal was to develop a museum that would have wide-reaching effects within its location. We wanted an architectural icon to help lead the process of renewal in the harbour area. Santiago Calatrava was commissioned to create an entirely new and original building specifically for Praça Mauá.

Can you give an overview of the museum?
It would be hard to find another museum like this in the world right now; it’s really the first of its kind. At the Museum of Tomorrow, our aim is to probe the possible future scenarios of the next five decades by considering past and current trends.

We’re not a traditional museum that preserves a collection. We have an immaterial collection communicated through experiential exhibits. The idea is that through the sequence of concepts and experiences, the visitor becomes aware of the choices we all have in our hands today that will decide which future we will have.

The Museum of Tomorrow is described as an experiential museum. What does that mean?
The aim is not to just convey information or offer works to be contemplated by the visitor, but to engage the visitor – their senses, mind, heart and soul – in a series of experiences that affect a change in them.

How did you curate the content?
We assembled a group of experts and identified the science we wanted to present. We discussed how to build a narrative where the visitor would follow a journey that presented a range of different moments, perspectives and supporting evidence. We wanted to provide them with the means to work out different outcomes and build on our possible future scenarios. Science is about cause and effect and we want our visitors to engage with the idea that if they take certain actions today then certain future scenarios are favoured. We wanted them to experience cause and effect.

What role does technology play?
Technology is fundamental in an experiential museum that has no physical collection and traditional artefacts. Technology enables us to deliver our content because the museum is entirely digital – except for one single material piece, everything is digital.

All the museum’s multimedia, audiovisual content is stored in a central system, which we call the Cerebrum. It also collects real-time data on climate and population from space agencies and organisations like the UN. We can manage each exhibit separately so if we receive a new report or new scientific findings then we we can easily update the relevant content.

We also have a system that allows us to monitor the ‘metabolism’ of the building – we call it the Iris – which collects visitor data via a card that they can scan.

So the exhibits are based on data from institutions around the world?
Yes. We work with around 80 institutions, including Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research (INPE), NASA, ESA, UNESCO and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

You mentioned a single material artefact. What is that?
There are five main zones in the museum. In the Us zone, there’s an oca, an indigenous “wisdom longhouse” where elders share information and wisdom with younger generations. The tjurunga, an object used by Australian aborigines to symbolise the passing on of knowledge, is central to this area. It’s among the most ancient artefacts ever created and is the only physical object in the main exhibit.

The wooden longhouse is lit by over 1,000 bulbs, which switch on and off and change through the colours of sunrise to sunset in synch with soft music. This sensory experience was designed by architect Mônica Lobo, designer Muti Randolph and composer Lucas Marcier. The exhibit aims to communicate the notion that it is always tomorrow since the sun is always rising somewhere in the world, and each dawn is different because every day is a new day.

Why was Santiago Calatrava chosen as architect?
It was the personal choice of the mayor of Rio de Janeiro. Calatrava was selected, I think, because of the impact that his work has and because he is a disciple of the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.

Calatrava spent two months in Rio making sense of the place, looking at the historical and natural environment and getting to know the city. During his research, he went to the botanical gardens and saw a flower, the bromeliad, which is a very typical to this tropical ecosystem. The building’s shape was inspired by the form of the bromeliad flower. Calatrava created more than 400 designs, sketches and paintings during this process.

Who funded the museum?
The museum cost about $100m (£69m, €88m) and was funded by the City of Rio de Janeiro and the Roberto Marinho Foundation, with Banco Santander as master sponsor. It has BG Brasil as maintainer, providing about $864,000 (£599,000, €756,000) per year, and the support of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

What is the Roberto Marinho Foundation and how does it assist in the development of the museum?
The Roberto Marinho Foundation is a private foundation associated with the largest media group in Brazil, Globo Group. It has a long tradition in education and heritage and for some time now it has been creating new kinds of museums, such as the Museum of the Portuguese Language and the Museum of Football, in São Paulo, the Palace of Frevo, in Recife, and the Museum of Art of Rio (MAR), which forms a cultural hub in Praça Mauá with the Museum of Tomorrow.

How do you keep the museum financially viable?
We receive funds from the city government and our aim is to run on 50 per cent government funding and 50 per cent raised through corporate funding, individual giving, memberships and private events.

Who is your target audience?
We believe that an eight-year-old and an 88-year-old are able to experience our content and exhibitions, so the publicity and media campaigns target everyone.

We also have ways of developing different audiences. We targeted those who live in the port region close to the museum with a specific membership programme before we opened. We invited them to visit the museum during the final stages of construction and we had about 2,000 members by the time the museum opened.

The port region is a poor region, where half the population earns less than $400 (£277, €350) per month so it was a challenge to engage them, but they became very interested in the museum and it’s become a place for them – a place for encounters, for leisure and so on.

How many visitors are you receiving?
We reached 300,000 visitors in under 100 days. At this rate, we’ll probably have 1 million people within the first year.

What is the museum’s capacity?
We can easily accommodate 6,000 people at a time, but to provide the best experience for the visitors we believe that 5,000 people per day is a healthy number.

How are you encouraging repeat visits?
Our programme invites the public to investigate the past, understand the changes we can make in the present and explore and imagine possible futures. So the programmes we offer in the Activities of Tomorrow Laboratory and the Observatory of Tomorrow – which receives and processes information from our institutions – are designed to encourage those people to come back to the museum.

For example, on Tuesdays we monitor the vital signs of the Earth through workshops showing the dynamics of the oceans. We recently invited a scientist to talk about the Zika virus – a big health issue in Brazil right now. We also change our temporary exhibitions to keep people coming back.

What reaction has there been to the museum so far and do you have a feedback system in place?
The digital data the Iris gathers is feedback for us. We also conducted a survey in January in order to understand the visitor profile and their satisfaction rates. Ninety-eight per cent of people said that they had a great experience and they would recommend the museum. We found out that 98 per cent of visitors were coming with a family member or a friend and interestingly about 42 per cent of our visitors said they did not describe themselves as museum visitors. Most of them hadn’t been to a museum in the past year and 10 per cent had never been to a museum before.

What future development plans do you have?
We are focused right now on our next temporary exhibitions, making sure that we have very good exhibitions for the next two years so. We just opened a second main temporary exhibition about Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator. It will open until October, running at the museum during the Olympic period.

After that, we have an exhibition on Brazilian innovation – in the sense of dealing with the unexpected and improvising. It’s something that goes deep into the culture and tradition, especially of the poor people of Brazil. It’s also a paradigm for innovation in the most expensive and technical sense. It will be very interesting to combine these aspects.

We’re also looking to forge partnerships with important institutions that will enable us to bring major exhibitions to Brazil. Perhaps at some time we can start exporting our exhibitions, too.