Artifacts from the Future of Food
Rather than over-indexing on its legacy of American agriculture, U.S. Soy wanted to own its corner of the future — by writing it. Every episode of its podcast, Eating Tomorrow, was lead by an audio artifact (like Squeggs! below) that provoked curious listeners and set the scene for the facts to follow. Check out the whole Eating Tomorrow podcast series on Spotify.
Artifacts from the Future of Employee Satisfaction
Based on the hypothesis that differentiated customer service is dependent upon comfortable, engaged employees, this multi-sensory portfolio of products explored what might make “return to office” feel less terrible. Client-sponsors engaged in participatory scenarios, then made their own storytelling artifacts.
Artifacts from the Future of Public Health Response
The Hawaii Department of Health pondered how experiential futures might prepare citizens for a pandemic response. So, in this “guerilla futures” engagement, passers-by encountered artifacts of a “post-pandemic scenario” while designers observed and captured reactions — because while you cannot yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, you can yell “whoa did you see that fire back there?!”
Artifacts from the Future of Augmented Reality
Concepted in 2004 (!) on behalf of a group of AR hardware pioneers, these speculative interfaces helped communicate to investors the potential applications of augmented reality. Personally, it is remarkable to observe how far we’ve come with the design of the UI — get a load of that early 2000s softness! — and how far we have left to go with the design of the gear.
