Design prototyping is an excellent way to bring imaginable future(s) to life, to make them visible, tangible, ‘experiencable‘ and allow people to deal with their meaning(s) in versatile ways. Prototyping – whether conceptual or physical – makes for possible contextual scenarios in the foresight-sense to give rise to possible scenarios-of-use in the user centred design-sense. As such, in foresight activities these designs not only help to evoke more in-depth qualitative reflections from stakeholders, they can also give direct leads as to how to take up certain strategic challenges posed by the scenario, thereby co-creating new value(s).

In ways reminiscent of experimental projects by Philips Design as well as the EU research project Designing for Future Needs (see also here), and with a time horizon of about 10 years, industry partners and students at Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in New Zealand envisioned future solutions in an initiative titled Design Led Futures.

Professor Simon Fraser started it in order to challenge students “to step back from the constraints of daily practice, to look beyond the immediate product, to look at it in context, and to investigate the broader issues that surround it – human issues, issues of society, culture and behaviour – including emotional issues that are fundamental to industrial design as a discipline.”

So far three projects have been concluded, in which the focus lay explicitly upon the overall experience rather than the mere object of design :

• domestic bliss: students were required to create a new understanding of the role that appliances (such as fridges, washing machines and cookers) might play in the architecture and culture of the home
• inside-out: project on the theme of outdoor living and the role that appliances might play in making this possible and pleasurable
• energising water: project to explore and create a new understanding of the base material of water by creatively applying existing or new, specifically developed technologies

Check out the fascinating concepts that students developed.

One of the beauties of the pantopical viewpoint is that it reflects the wonderful diversity of ways in which people look at the future of certain aspects of their lives and express them in terms of their dreams, nightmares, expectations, wonderings … As such, following our participatory approach, breathing life into the future by visualizing one’s views on it, is something we like to do – and find important to do so – also beyond the boundaries of our day-to-day projects with customers in the public and private realm.

Therefore, after a long hiatus we decided to kickstart our FFWD>> competition again to involve you (yes, also you) in showcasing this diversity of views on the future. So we would hereby like to invite all you photoshoppers, mattepainting fans and visually creative minds out there, to participate in a new series of FFWD>> events. Current theme: education. How do you think education might look 20 years from now? Share with us a look through your mind’s eye.

Feel free to browse previous entries in the FFWD>> archive.

We are happy to notice that there are several other likeminded future(s) explorers and designers out there, who as we do, feel strongly about the importance of giving the many possible futures that might await us a face. In our foresight and (en)visioning activities at Pantopicon we continuously invest in new, different, better ways to create, use and study ‘experiencable futures‘, experiences carefully designed to enable people to reflect upon and respond to what certain future scenarios might look and feel like, might mean to them, their organizations, their environment, their products/services, policies and strategies etc.

Besides the different ways and means to bring the future to life (e.g. diaries of the future, future newsbulletins, future advertising, vision movies, future artefacts to name but a few of the ones we are using in our projects), there are also methodological issues involved in crafting and using them in foresight and (en)visioning activities, that require attention and study. Our overseas colleague Jason over at IFTF did a great job in describing their evolution and realization of the need for more structural discussion and collaborative learning on the topic of what he calls ‘human future interaction‘, or what we sometimes refer to as ‘experiencable futures‘ or ‘futures experiences‘.

As the environment warms up to the future, we look forward to further fascinating endeavours and discussion in this area, so stay tuned.

Chlorofilia 2106 … a mysterious title for a fascinating project, a gaze into the long term future of what we call cities. The reason why I blog about this is threefold, since the project deals with:

- ways to visualize a possible future by means of images and story
- organic systems & organic metaphor as a lens through which to look at and act within/upon the world
- contemporary architecture

The History Channel recently held a competition inviting architectural teams to design a city of the future, to envision Los Angeles, New York and Chicago a hundred years from now.

One of several fascinating and inspiring entries from a futurist’s perspective was the work of the Xefirotarch team (Hernan Diaz Alonso and colleagues) who did a marvellous job envisioning an organic future for Los Angeles. In 2106 Los Angeles became Chlorofilia, it became a “self-sustaining, self-protecting natural ecology, used converted highways as aqueducts and dispersed nutrients into an adaptable organism that continuously adjusted itself to changes in demographics and housing requirements.”

Together with the renowned motion graphics office imaginary forces, the architects introduced a new Los Angeles by means of a future-scenario video set in 2106, interviewing a person looking at the city in retrospect, how it came to be, how society is organized differently, how mobility is differently (although perhaps not ‘that’ much), how communication takes place via ‘cloud’-technology instead of phones etc. As such they touch upon a variety of aspects of the city and city-life in the future, in a changed and ever-changing context. As experience has taught us, such portrayals are powerful and effective means to convey a multi-perspectival, contextualized image of the future to a large audience.

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For quite some time, I’ve wanted to share with you some absolutely fascinating developments in the area of fashion, which need little imagination to realize how they could turn tomorrow into a very different reality. Let me introduce you to a few such developments.

During his Spring 2007 runway show, top-notch designer, media- and allround artist Hussein Chalayan demonstrated an absolutely amazing collection of robotically enhanced / animatronic clothing (see videos here and here). Poetry prevails over technology, leading to a breathtaking experience. Imagine a world in which garments change appearance, function, in which textiles change characteristics, in response to the person wearing them or the environment in which he or she moves. Our friends Luca Marchetti and Emanuele Quinz of Anomos and Mosign in Paris have the pleasure to work with a whole series of designers, among which Chalayan, for example, on avant-garde, artistic experience design projects weaving together past, present and possible futures of fashion.

A few months ago I already blogged about Philips design’s Skin project (part of Design Probes), focussing on the interaction between technology and our bodies and how that might affect the concept of clothing and our personal environment. Over in London, our friends Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz from wearable technology company CuteCircuit, not only made it to Wired’s NextFest future fair but also onto Time magazine’s list of “Best inventions of 2006″ with their hugshirt, a project they initiated while still at the former Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy and kept on finetuning ever since.

Some of their projects are also included in the book “Fashioning the future”, published by Thames & Hudson, which gives a glimpse into tomorrow’s wardrobe.

Obviously, all clothes need washing or stay clean, but imagine leaving out the water … think ultrasonic waves, or ozone, or ultraviolet light, or bacteria.

Like any e-technology, wearable technology embedded in clothing needs energy, power. Several solutions are under study or development, e.g. solutions based on body-heat, light-sensitive fibres, kinetic energy from body-movement, recharging washing cycles, etc.

For more future-forwarded fashion, also check out “Fashion for the 21st century”. Stay tuned for more entries on our ‘wearable future’.

Image from Style.com

Theatre is a wonderful medium able to touch people at profound levels of experience. As such, it is also a fascinating tool to bring to life things which we cannot see, because they are intangible or because they simply not exist yet (think imaginary scenarios, possible futures etc.).

Our friends at Theater ad Hoc , to put it in their own words,

“make performances about invisible science – current developments in science that can no longer be seen by the naked eye. Developments that have a great influence on our comings and goings. On our near future. Take for instance elementary particles, the building blocks of matter. We are completely made up out of them, yet we can’t see them. What’s more, they behave entirely differently than we could ever possibly imagine. It’s food for thought: the building blocks of our bodies follow a different logic than we do ourselves.

Under the motto Reality is too interesting to leave it to the realists, Theater Adhoc tries literally and figuratively to gain insight into such invisible dimensions by unleashing the imaginative power of the arts upon them.”

Their research-theatre performances have covered topics such as genomics, elementary particles, classification, etc. Their current production is titled “Blueprint: thinking brings illumination”, and is on display, or rather to be experienced on several locations in the Netherlands these days.
It is an interactive installation for one or more visitors at a time, a blueprint for the visualization of the invisible, a sensory experience at the boundaries of thinking and seeing.

Anders Sandberg, futurist, neuroscientist, transhumanist and science director of the Swedish Eudoxa think tank studying the cultural impact of emerging technologies, wrote an article for the Lifeboat Foundation in which he explores possible warning signs by which we might see ourselves surrounded in the future: non-standard spacetime, antimatter, self-replicating device, ubiquitous surveillance, memetic hazard, etc.

The article also describes a threat-level classification based upon the logarithm of the number of threatened people. More interestingly the author also speaks of an ‘outrage scale’:

“to show just how outraged people will be if something goes wrong. Maybe this could be marked with a series of symbols or icons, denoting for example that if you mess up this particular thing, the damage is going to involve new technology, children, chronic effects and personal responsibility.”

The warning signs offer an interesting visualization and trigger tool to explore future developments. It somehow reminds me of some of our FFWD>> entries, which – less technologically inclided – described societal changes leading to changes in street signage.

Via: PlausibleFutures.com

Visionary leaders are scarce. Jan Kriekels of Jaga, the radiator factory, however, fits the description once put forward so eloquently in Apple’s Think Different campaign. He belongs to “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently [...] they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire.”

A while ago, Jan & Co. launched Uchronians.org, which is, more than a mere meeting place, a benevolent virus set out to infect as many creative minds as possible, people daring to colour beyond traditional lines, to think of and work on alternative futures together … See it as an experiential time machine.
The term ‘uchronian’ is a time-variant of ‘utopian’, where place makes room for time, pointing at a state of ‘no time’. Uchronians was named after Uchronia, an installation made out of 150 km of timber with a floor span of 60 by 30 metres, and a height of 15 metres, built and burnt to the ground in Black Rock City, Nevada, at the Burning Man 2006 festival. It was a mindchild of Jan Kriekels and Arne Quinze.

PS. Jan Kriekels of Jaga was among the speakers at the enchanting C-mine site in Genk, Belgium on 29/09/2006 for the launching event of the Media & Design Academy’s Experience Design Lab, an initiative in which Pantopicon was involved as well.

In an artistically and technologically fascinating way, the Khronos Projector, developed by Alvaro Cassinelli and his colleagues at the Ishikawa-Namiki-Komuro Lab at Tokyo University, allows one to travel through time within moving imagery. By touching a deformable projection screen, one is able to move parts of the image forward or backwards in time. Space and time become mixed.

In a more practical, yet perhaps less artistic way, think of time for a minute not as video timestamps but as physical time. It could lead to fascinating interactive applications of the khronos projector (in slightly modified form) in the area of future exploration and participatory foresight. At Pantopicon, we often take clients on a trip through time to give them a look and feel of the dynamics of time, velocity of change etc. (see Time Inspiration Journey). Imagine standing in front of the Khronos Projector and watching the camera walk down your street. By touching your neighbour’s house, you see it morph into the house that used to be there before. In terms of making people experience the future in a nearly physical way, it would mean you shift forward in time and see part of what the future scenario holds for the space where your neighbour’s house is located now.

Endless possibilities …