Designer and University of Dundee graduate, Patrick Stevenson-Keating became inspired “by the pioneering work of Professor David Deutsch of Oxford University, and the earlier work of Professor Hugh Everett, who argue for infinite copies of ourselves existing within multiple universes”.

As such he developed the quantum parallelograph, a device enabling users to explore the lives of their parallel selves in parallel versions of the universe. At the turn of a knob and the touch of a button, the device spits out a cash-register like receipt of your life in another parallel world. Hence, through a glimpse at their alternative selves and the world they live in, people are implicitly provoked to question their uniqueness and ponder about physics in general. Another subtle example of critical design or design for debate, a field we are particularly fond of and like to experiment with over here at Pantopicon.

The direct link with alternative worlds links this particular example even more closely with the realm of foresight and scenario analysis. Imagine a few extra knobs or levers to set parameters on future developments and you’d have a tangible future scenario-generator, yourself as persona included!

Keep up the good work, Patrick!

Look at any megatrend overview and ‘migration‘ will be mentioned somewhere, somehow as a significant driver of change. The recent events in Northern Africa have made it clear once again that events of major socio-political and socio-economic change catalyze the push and pull dynamics of migration. The recurring images of sinking boats of African immigrants as they try to make it across the Mediterranean to the Italian island of Lampedusa in the past few weeks are a painful example of the challenges posed.

Félix de Montesquiou and Hugo Kaici – architecture students at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris – decided to give architectural shape to the migration debate and a world  in which illegal trafficking of people across the channel is cast in stone. In a neat piece of design fiction, they envisioned N.E.M.O. – the Northern Europe Migrants Organisation – an organization with headquarters disguised as a WWII bunker near the port of Calais in France.  N.E.M.O. would help customers migrate illegally from Europe to the UK.

Via Dezeen

“What if you were given a glimpse into what America will be like 20, 30, or even 50 years from now? Would it change the way you live today?” Spurred by these questions the Independent Television Service launches the second season of Futurestates on PBS. Ten short films portray ten visions of the future by ten indie filmmakers. Stories gravitate towards issues concerning environmental and economic challenges, but also revolve around soci-cultural topics.

There appears to be a surge in attention across media towards speculative – what if …? – futures as a genre rather than straight-up scifi, an evolution which is fascinating to say the least. It remains up to the critical eye of the beholder to decide to which extent the Futurestates short-films paint stimulating futures – whether bleak or encouraging – or rather mostly project extrapolations of today’s sentiments and challenges. Moreover, considering shifting geopolitical, geosocial, geoeconomic, geo-everything balances, it would be enriching to see more examples of how people from other countries, other cultures envision their futures. Not only would they bring other types of narratives, they would also pose different questions, paint different solutions to the samen and different challenges.

High-end glass (and ceramics) producer Corning recently created a nice video showing a day in the life of a family in a world of … glass. The video basically shows the world as one big touch screen (without greasy fingers). Obviously, from today’s perspective, the success of touchscreens are one big pointer to a future of ‘more’. Yet, there are also various elements equally present in today’s world that point in other directions.

One the one hand, while there is plenty of room for innovative and more natural interaction patterns – touch definitely being one of them, but also gesture of course – there are also plenty of worries abound that the increasing amounts of information, presented visually in our daily environments, are leading to situations of sensorial and cognitive overload on the user end. On the other hand, glass is not the only material able to render surfaces and the world around us interactive. Just think about all the advances in smart textiles (check out also Ryan and Francesca’s inspiring work over at CuteCircuit as well as that of Marina over at by-wire) or the skin as an interface (see also CMU’s Chris Harrison’s Skinput and a previous blogpost on “skinterfaces“).

The future of touch also goes beyond the ‘one-way’ touch that we are currently used to. Bayer Material Science and its subsidiary Artificial Muscle for example, developed electroactive polymers that enable devices and screens to provide tactile feedback. In other words, the surface might be smooth, but you feel texture.

On a sidenote … While many still associate the advent of touch screens with the launch of the iPhone and derivatives or Jeff Han‘s large-format interactive screens, the history of many of the interaction patterns involved goes back to the nineties. In 1999, for example, the former GMD-IPSI’s (now Frauenhofer-IPSI) Ambiente Lab – active in CSCW and other areas – presented their vision of workplaces of the future entitled i-LAND. Already, one could tap, swipe, even push documents from an interactive table to an interactive wall.

Image is still from the Corning video

Aesthetics are about more than ‘spicing things up’, rendering them ‘more beautiful’. In information design, meaning is core. As the world becomes more layered, as data becomes ever more important, we increasingly need innovative ways to bring insight and calm to complexity. Check out Visual Complexity and InfoSthetics for example. But the art and science of this matter is not limited to paper or screen, as the following example shows.

Danish architecture firm Bjarne Ingels Group (aka BIG) and our friends over at realities:united won an international competition to design a new waste-to-energy plant for Copenhagen (DK). The Amagerforbraending will not only burn waste and convert it to energy, its 31.000m2 rooftop will also feature skiing slopes of varying degrees of difficulty for Copenhagen’s citizens, turning the building into a pole of attraction in its own right, thereby changing the relationship between people and waste, energy, etc. While doing its job, the building will blow smoke rings into the air.

Each smoke ring, approximately 30 meters in diameter and 3 meter in height, constitutes exactly one ton of fossil carbon dioxide, which is added to the atmosphere. [...] “Exploiting the so called Bernoulli effect these rings will remain stable for up to several minutes, serving as a gentle reminder of the impact of consumption and a measuring stick that will allow the common Copenhagener to grasp the CO2 emission in a straightforward way – turning the smokestack – traditionally the symbol of the industrial era – into a communicator for the future”, [says] Jan Edler, Artist, realities:united [...] At night, heat tracking lights will be used to position lasers onto the smoke rings turning them into glowing, communicative artworks. As proposed pie chart will be projected onto the smoke, where the actual quota of fossil CO2 can be read.

In designing for behavioral change, rendering the invisible visible, the complex insightful and understandable are an important first step.

Via realities:united
Image courtesy of realities:united

BaR2D2 serves drinks, Asimo walks the planet as man’s new best friend, NASA’s Robonaut 2 takes to space and loves to twitter. Robots continue to inspire. Several exhibitions currently on show give a glimpse of some highly creative – even poetic – robotic tinkering by artists.

Hangar311 in Mechelen (B), puts the inspiring work of Stéphane Halleux on show. Tinguely meets ToyStory in a steampunk version.

Our friends over at the Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains (CH) focus on the work of new media artist, author and theorist Ken Rinaldo in their exhibition entitled “Do robots dream of spring?”.

Ken Rinaldo’s art promotes communication between species. By creating immersive environments, the artist presents works to be experienced. He puts human beings in our rightful place, one that is integrated into vast systems, of which we are simultaneously the architects, the prisoners and the custodians. He shows us that our environment is an immense meeting place where worlds collide, a place of shifting borders, which he encourages us to explore.

The Tinguely Museum (in cooperation with Kunsthaus Graz) takes a closer look at artificial intelligence and robotics in their 1000m2 exhibition Robot Dreams.

Enjoy!

We were delighted to take notice of another project which shares our passion for positive, optimistic futures! Our friend and much admired fellow design fiction future-storyteller Anab ‘Superflux‘ Jain was one of eight people (others included a biotechnologist, a policy advisor, a permaculturalist, an educator, a retired civil servant, an urban designer and an architect ) involved in a unique project which ran from June 1st 2009 to October 11th 2009 to imagine ‘optimistic futures’. Funded by the Arts Council England and Watermans Gallery, the Power of 8 was part of the London Design Festival 2009.  The magnificent 8 welcome you to Acres Green …

“Rolling orchards stretched beyond us as we wandered through the edible gardens of Acres Green. Spots of colour peppered the greenery and branches hung low with the weight of ripening produce. As we looked closer we saw that each tree was actually growing different varieties of fruit. What we originally understood as a tangle of different trunks was actually an intricate technological graft. On parting the leaves we found strange flesh-like prosthesis that seemed to bind limbs from different species together. We realised that to maximise harvests the communities of Acres Green were experimenting with augmented orchards and designing strange new natures.”

Check out the Power of 8 website to feed on more, nifty futurefood incl. pan-city feral cidre businesses, Beamer Signum Apis Melifera aka beamer bees, living hills, flocking clouds, etc. Well done, 8!

Image courtesy of The Power of 8

The Apollo mission gave us pictures of our planet from space. Finally we could behold our planet from a distance. We could look at it as an object on the table in front of us, within reach, and as we did our planetary awareness grew. Confronted with several planetary challenges now, our planetary conscience is now gradually shaping up as well. Aside from looking at our planet, NASA‘s Earth Observation System (EOS) reads our planet through satellite data. Access to this information is a prerequisite for learning to understand our planet better. Now we can not only look at our planet, Prof. Shin-ichi Takemura’s amazing Tangible Earth project allows us to interact with our planet and the data emerging from it by touch.

In view of coming up with solutions to the challenges we are facing, sensing our planet has become sheer necessity. We increasingly do so in real time as well: within mouseclick reach we check webcams on the other side of the planet, we can download data from weatherstations around the world, etc.
Until recently, the sensing world was pretty much the playing field of NASA and the likes. The future promises to be more open in this respect (see  also open source efforts such as GSN) and consequently much larger – and since we’re talking data: more powerful. Years ago, in describing his wish of an Earth Witness Project, our fellow future explorer Jamais Cascio already pointed to opportunities opened up by the convergence between labs on chips, mobile phones and sharing networks to create an open global sensor network.

Now several companies and grassroots initiatives are preparing to put technology in the hands of citizens. Already we can deduce a lot of information from information we leak by the mere usage of our communication technology, as Carlo Ratti‘s Senseable cities team at MIT shows us. Nokia’s Eco Sensor Concept plans to make us more active participants in the game. Imagine millions of always-on, networked tricorder-like devices sensing our planet : local data + networks + sensemaking = global intelligence. Hewlett-Packard is developing the equivalent of a globally distributed stethoscope (CeNSE) to monitor our planet’s health, and look to nanotechnology as an enabling technology. “The motivation for this work is realising and understanding the planet is sick and the disease is us.”, says Dr Stan Williams of HP’s Information & Quantum Systems Laboratory.

An often forgotten challenge is how to use tech already out there to turn them into sensors for our health and that of our planet. Think about the tech equivalent of using ‘useless’ bath-tub ducks which fell off a ship, to study ocean currents.

Until the end of September 2009, the Musée du Cinquantenaire in Brussels showcases Vegetal City, an absolutely fascinating overview exhibition on the work of Luc Schuiten, the belgian visionary architect, illustrator, author. Years ago Schuiten started working on his archiborescence vision on urban development, as an alternative future to look out for, a way out of the current-day unsustainable impasse.

Vegetal city is a vision of a transformed society driven by a quest for sustainability in which notions of biomimicry provide for a solutioning framework.

“We can’t carry on with individualistic attitudes which boil down to ‘I’ll just do my own thing and let the rest of the world go by.’ We need to change the way our entire society thinks in order to make it compatible with the rest of the world of which it forms part, and on which it ultimately depends.”

Schuiten understands the power of stories to convey his vision. As such he moves beyond the mere aspect of ‘visualizing’ what one means.

Check out the unique exhibition and/or the book.

The Board of Innovation – an initiative by friends and fellow belgian bloggers Nick De Mey (see mouseover.be) & Philippe De Ridder (see openinnovators.net) – kicks off its 24 hours of innovation today: a non-stop marathon of innovation initiatives.

Organizations big and small, national and international will take part in this unique online event. On the playlist are among others our one-time neighbours of AddictLab & Materio, our friends from FlandersDC, trendwatcher Richard Lamb, the City of Antwerp, Sun Microsystems, VisualDimension, Umicore, IdeaMonopoly, Betavine, Symnetics from Brazil, UAMS, Pfizer, URDT from Uganda, and many others. Keep your thumbs up, as Pantopicon participates as well (see here)!

Update: see our contributions “5 what if teasers” and “10 ways in which exploring & envisioning the future empowers innovation”. Thanks Nick & Philippe, another job well done!

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!

Continuing our stroll through the growing landscape of corporate future visions, we re-stumbled upon Microsoft. Microsoft Office Labs put out a series of videos glimpsing ahead into the future of banking, retail, manufacturing and healthcare during the past few years, each time keeping a time horizon of 5-10 years in mind. Although the viewing experience is somewhat hindered by the low quality of the videos, check out some of their mixed-reality futures …

Health (2007) – Imagine a future where you can monitor your own health with smart, connected devices, your health team can share data seamlessly, and doctors are empowered with a view of health records across multiple sources – all leading to better, faster, safer, more personalized care.

Manufacturing (2006) – Imagine a manufacturing environment of the future where workers collaborate seamlessly across time-zones, predictive technologies automate processes, and sense and respond systems are connected across organizations, leading to better innovation, improved efficiencies, and more flexibility for customized products.

Banking (2005) – Imagine a banking experience where you’re always connected to your finances, banks are empowered to anticipate your needs, and transactions are seamless through predictive technologies – whether you’re in the branch, at home, or on the go.

Retail (2004) – Imagine a store of the future where you can quickly find and purchase everything you need; you have instant access to the product information you want; and the store can anticipate your needs and provide price and product offers in tune with your shopping history.

For those of you only out to get a quick glimpse, check out the montage.

Via Customer Experience Labs

In light of some major challenges the world and humanity as a whole are facing – e.g. climate change, depletion of natural resources, pollution, mobility issues etc. – future threats and opportunities are increasing the sense of urgency for massive change. As such, also many of the world’s bigger companies – especially those threatened by the future and a changing public opinion – are turning to storytelling or more open platforms in order to share with their (and new) audiences the ways in which they see, prepare for and involve others in the creation of/steering towards a better future. 

Hitachi is sharing ‘true stories‘, Shell shows their future/innovation oriented endeavours on RealEnergy, Volkswagen takes us to 2028, Philips Design has its probes, Xerox has its Future of Documents blog etc.

Toyota recently launched an interactive website to show and let people explore the ways in which they see and prepare for the future. 

“Toyota’s vision of future mobility. Minimize the Negative, Maximize the Positive and Humanize Mobility.

To enrich people’s lives and society in the future as well as achieve sustainability, technologies must be developed that have minimal negative impact on people and the environment and bring maximum benefit to people’s lives.

Going even furter, Toyota is also incorporating the hopes and dreams of people from all over the world into research and development to create future technologies that are more attuned to human beings. Toyota-future.com introduces Toyota’s future endeavours in a variety of fields, including:

- the safety, comfort and environmental standards demanded of new vehicles

- new mobility to enable greater freedom of movement

- partner robots to support people and benefit society”

Seen interesting ways in which companies showcase their ‘futures’? Drop us a comment.

Meet Oblong Industries‘ G-speak, an amazing gesture based interface à la Minority Report allowing ‘hands-on’ interaction between people and data. The resemblance is no co-incidence as one of Oblong’s founders – John Underkoffler, formerly at MIT’s Tangible Media Group – was one of the science advisors to the movie-team.

“The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.”

Some of the system’s features seem to build further upon early-day HCI projects at Frauenhofer (GMD at the time) in the 90s.

Catching up on some long overdue blogpost drafts …

Ever wondered what a flooded London might look like? Visual powerhouse Squint Opera squeezed out some fascinating images, which were featured as an exhibition during the London Architecture festival this summer.

“The general scenario is set 80 or so years into the future, long after the sea levels have risen. The catastrophic side of the sea coming in has long since past and the five images are snapshots of people going about their lives, having adapted to the city’s new circumstance.”

Click here to view a slideshow of their lovely mattepaintings.