The Future Starts Here: 100 Projects Shaping the World of Tomorrow

Thought provoking exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at 100 newly released products or ideas in development now which will shape the world of tomorrow.

 
This show was packed with ideas around the themes of self, public, planet and afterlife. It would be fun to rerun it in ten years to see what effect the products have had. I’ve been interested to see how many of the developments I have spotted in the real world since. However I also liked the warning it came with through a quote from Paul Virillio “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the ship wreck.”
 
I found some of the inventions horrific like the glove to be worn by warehouse staff on which they can read the orders but it also measures how long it takes them to fulfil an order and counts any mistakes they make. This seems to be eroding their personal value as an employee and turning people into robots.
 
I did feel at times we are inventing a fix to a problem rather than addressing the problem itself. I do like the Ikea temporary shelter but maybe we should be spending more time looking at why people need these shelters and solving that. 
 
Others I loved such as the system of giving each 3m2 of the planet a three word address which has been adopted by the UN. I’ve seen it used since by a sculpture trail around London and it really helped to pin point where things were. Great for places with shared postcodes or remote areas. So greetings from spaces.small.steps.
 
I learnt a lot too such as the fact Alexa, the Amazon voice activation software, is named after the great library at Alexandria plus the law introduced by Obama in 2015 which allows US citizens to own resources found in space.
 
Closes on 4 November 2018
 
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