Julian Bleecker and his Near Future Laboratory have followed up on their amazing Skymall-of-the-future catalog with an imaginary near-future Ikea catalog that jam an insane amount of witty futuristic speculation into elegantly presented, arresting images.
The whole catalog is a brilliant exploration of the way that the Internet of Things will change our economic and social relationships, a thousand times better than any written pieces of powerpoints.
Even more interesting and useful is Bleecker's commentary on the Near Future Lab process, and how they applied it here:
For example, our extrapolation of an Ikea kitchen has the things you might imagine (and have been "demo'd") in a near future IoT world. Cooking instructions appear dynamically on countertops, complete with anecdotes meant to keep the cooking experience lively — and likely complete with subtle opportunities to make a purchase of a fancy cutting knife, or book a reservation to the country from which the recipe is derived. The micro-fictions embedded in the catalog are where our Design Fiction makes subtle suggestions about how the near future may be a bit different from today.For example, implying new economic contexts that were an aspect of the design brief can be done in subtle ways, such as peculiar regional disclaimers, odd explanatory iconography, subscription pricing models for furniture as the 'new normal' — in our near future, an Ikea kitchen is 'self-subscribing', a peculiar, eyebrow-raising neologism meant to suggest a new weird context of exchange dreamed-up by some near future product people in which our near future selves are comfortable with smart technologies that somehow know what's best for us.
An Ikea Catalog From The Near Future
[Julian Bleecker/Medium]
(via Beyond the Beyond)
