Feeling the Future

In Living Digital 2040, you can feel the future.

Preparing for the future is often difficult because it simply does not feel as “real” as the present and the past. We have yet to experience it. We thus risk preparing for the future in purely abstract terms.

In Living Digital 2040, we designed artefacts-from-the-future to help you overcome this risk. By seeing what future everyday products might look like (see montage above), you can better appreciate how social, economic and technological trends affect the way you live. And how the way we live, might in turn shape — even change — these same trends.

An example of such an artefact is the humble baby bib (see above). We show how even a simple everyday object can be transformed by:

• parental concerns for health and education
• advances in smart fabrics, AI, behavioral genetics, and digital manufacturing
• historical and international economic networks and innovation clusters

Another artefact-from-the-future is EduBang, which shows how you can assemble lessons on-the-fly as learning becomes more modular and on-demand.

In addition, designing such artefacts-from-the-future kept us grounded in human hopes, fears, and aspirations. They went hand-in-hand with our personas. As former British Museum Director Neil MacGregor put it:

“… it’s making ‘things’ and then coming to depend on ‘things’ that sets us apart from all other animals and, ultimately, turns us into the humans we are today.”

Artefacts-from-the-future then, do more than just help us feel the future. They also urge us to decide what humans we would like to be tomorrow.

You can feel the future through our artefacts-from-the-future in Living Digital 2040: Future of Work, Education, and Healthcare (available from World Scientific Publishing’s website and Amazon at Living Digital 2040: Future Of Work, Education And Healthcare).