Archeology fascinates people, especially children. As they dig up stuff in the garden, their imagination runs wild as they fantasize about all kinds of stories from times past. As we walk the streets, as we use everyday object and live contemporaneity, most of us will have wondered at some point: will this still exist in a few centuries? or: what will future generations dig up from our times? which stories will they reconstruct around them?

Some craft special devices to survive the times. Timecapsules are popular among scientists, amateurs, children … More than merely preserving the past, they are  used to send a message to the future.

So-called future archeology works the other way around: we imagine a world of tomorrow’s making and imagine to dig up some of its artifacts. What might they look like? In which kind of world did they originate? Wired’s Found series is a good example of this approach, one we often indulge in as well at Pantopicon. We either create such artifacts together with people as a participatory design exercise during our workshops to render the future tangible or we craft some of our own  as triggers to shake people out of today’s constraint based reasoning patterns and plunge them into possible tomorrows.

As I was preparing some designs for a set of looking boxes to allow people to gaze into future scenarios, I somehow stumbled upon the fascinating work of the Swiss designer collective Postfossil. They describe the deeper ground of their work as follows :

“In an age of increased reliance on carbon emitting technology and a rapidly depleting natural resource pool, POSTFOSSIL address the question– How will we live in a post-fossil fuel age?”

As such they made a whole series of boxes – dubbed boîtes de l’avenir - to raise awareness about our age of fossil fuels as we move into a postfossil era. Click through and meet the beautifully crafted and inspiring Actioreactio, A Kiss Good Bye,  Ten Matches, Postfossilien, To teeter on the brick of collapse, Pandora’s Box, The Speaking Sun, Historical Landscape.

The boxes somehow reminded me of Joseph Cornell‘s artworks. Well done, Postfossil!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 14:10 and is filed under arts, design, experience, future, methods & techniques, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.