Close your eyes and think back 20 years to 1995 or 1996. It was a different millennium and the major worry was the “millennium bug” that threatened to disable every computer in the world at midnight 1999. How did you live then? There was no pocket-sized mobile phone, iphone, ipad or laptop computer. Sony’s playstations were only just becoming available, having been introduced in Japan a year earlier. Coffee shops were for drinking coffee, not for surfing the web or running entrepreneurial businesses. 1995 saw the invention of the DVD, now itself superseded by blue-ray and by internet streaming, and shopping still meant visiting real shops – Amazon and Ebay only started in 1995, the year in which Microsoft introduced its revolutionary Windows 95 with new features such as a taskbar and start button.
Think of the many ways the world that we live in has changed in the last 20 years, and now think forward 20 years to 2035. How would you like to live? How would you like your children to live? Would you like to live in a more sustainable way, much more in tune with nature and free of consumerism, reusing and recycling as much as possible, or would you prefer to live in a world that uses biology and new technologies in a way that is even more high-tech than today, using science to minimise our impact on natural resources, or perhaps you would prefer to start again in space on somewhere like Mars, to which it may well be possible to travel within that period, shrunk-wrapped and where even kissing would have to adapt to the different atmosphere.
These were the three options for consideration at the Nationalmuseum Design’s exhibition “Domestic Futures” in the Kulturhuset in Stockholm with futuristic designs from designers across the world grouped together around these three themes. There was voting too and, at the end of the exhibition, the Bio-Tech Living had achieved the most votes from visitors to the exhibition – using biology and technology together to create a future of sustainable living. Come back in 2035 and see how many of these designs have become real.
