Could this be the future of parenting?

NurturePod installation and photos by Stuart Candy

This experiential scenario from a not too distant future, my first "solo" art museum installation (really, all this work is highly collaborative), is now live at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium.

Futurist/journalist Andrew Curry and I recently had a chance to chat about the project for an upcoming issue of the Association of Professional Futurists quarterly, Compass. Many thanks to Andrew and APF for sharing the transcript below (edited for clarity and length).

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Andrew Curry: What we have here is a very small baby –– not a real baby –– in a little pod surrounded by all sorts of digital stimulus looking after her or his needs. This is a "programmable para-parenting pod", which basically removes the need for parents to get involved, as far as I can tell. It's a bargain at €789, obviously. What was the brief, Stuart?

Stuart Candy: The brief for A Temporary Futures Institute was to create some kind of a design contribution corresponding to Dator's generic images of the future; grow, collapse, discipline or transform, and I was assigned "transform". I had this quite large space and could basically do anything that fit the budget and time. To get from those broad parameters to the final installation really started from the name. There was a prior project (which appeared in Compass) called NaturePod, a hypothetical product from a handful of years away, addressed to stressed-out office workers who may need to reduce their cortisol levels and increase productivity by spending time in nature, without leaving their cubicles. That was a provocative take on what happens when you marry supposedly biophilic interior design trends to virtual reality.

AC: So this is a kind of companion piece?

SC: Right. It came about in a conversation with my longtime collaborator, Jake Dunagan –– a lot of our work is based on wordplay and being silly –– and he said, "well, when you're done with NaturePod, you should do NurturePod, ha ha ha". He was joking, but I thought it was a brilliant idea. Then this opportunity came along, and I realised that, while this might not be my idea of a transformation, it does actually correspond to a popular notion about what immersion in virtual environments means.

AC: It comes with all this very nice packaging and sales material. Clearly something about the commercialisation of it engaged you.

SC: A lot of the experiential futures work I've done is about bringing encounters with futures into an everyday context. Hence guerrilla futures projects like NaturePod; we launched it at an architecture and design trade show, so the people who came across it thought it was real. The organisers of the trade show knew what we were up to, but the thousands of others attending didn't. I was interested in trying to import the lessons and techniques from creating encounters "in the wild" into the cube of a contemporary art museum. That's why this piece is not sitting on a white box; it's sitting on the kind of table you might find in an Apple Store.

AC: The NurturePod box has all the kind of labelling detail you would expect to see in a package. Is that part of the experience as well?

SC: I think the attention to detail that makes a hypothetical resemble the real is an important part of this practice. It is intended to invite, not a suspension of disbelief exactly, but more an investment of belief, a kind of willing desire on the part of the viewer to say okay, suppose that I did come across this in a few years' time. What do I think about that? What do I feel about that? I think the details provide added dimensions of engagement so they can dive deeper, if they want to. Most people are probably going to engage with the main image; a glanceable, instagrammable baby in a pod wearing a headset. But for those who take the time, there is more detail to enjoy, or be dismayed by, according to your taste.

AC: There's a little tag, "control baby's experience with the NurturePod App", and a kind of WiFi, Bluetooth-type logo suggesting I can download it. I haven't actually tried to do that; I'm guessing that bit might not be real?

SC: That's right, it does break at a certain point because it isn't real, but it's supposed to feel like it is. All of these messaging elements are scaffolded in detail on existing products, and existing idioms that we recognise subconsciously, being citizens of the early 21st century. We’re literate in ways we don’t even realise about the semiotics of marketing, and electronics in particular. This is using that language to get something across about a seemingly imminent possibility.

AC: One more thing that strikes me about this, about the languaging, is it's not just about marketing. There are a whole lot of cues about the idea of the new, the idea of the modern, and the classic ways in which technology companies make us feel inadequate and then sell us reassurance.

SC: I suppose using those tropes could be said to invite reflection on how embedded in the tropes we are, because we know this particular thing doesn't exist. But that's a bit of an intellectual angle. I find people's emotional responses interesting, from watching them interact with it and from what they've shared in conversation.

AC: What sort of things have they said?

SC: "I'm really drawn to this, and also repulsed by it." There's this sense of being torn, and that is quite satisfying to hear, because I think creating or inviting a complex emotional response is something that we should strive for in futures work. This is why design and film and performance and games are important –– the whole repertoire of approaches to experiential futures; like the proverbial toothbrush that reaches places regular ones can't. Hopefully we are on our way to a better futures toothbrush.

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The NurturePod installation is just one part of A Temporary Futures Institute (ATFI), a boldly experimental M HKA exhibition which opened in April, curated by Anders Kreuger and Maya Van Leemput.

(M HKA was also the main venue for Design Develop Transform, where Kelly Kornet and I recently presented the Ethnographic Experiential Futures framework.)

There are some stellar artists featured in ATFI (including Michel Auder, Miriam Bäckström, Alexander Lee and Darius Žiūra), and the other futurists involved in the exhibition are Agence Future (Maya Van Leemput and Bram Goots, Belgium), The Centre for Postnormal Policy & Futures Studies (Ziauddin Sardar and John Sweeney, UK/US), and Mei Mei Song (Taiwan).

Show runs until 17 September –– so if you're within range of Antwerp, check it out!

Acknowledgements:

- Seth Keller and Kazuki Guzmán, Fabrication consultants

- Tarik El-Khateeb, Graphics consultant

- Special thanks: Maya Van Leemput and Anders Kreuger (for curating ATFI); Bram Goots (for crucial logistical help), Ceda Verbakel (for copywriting assistance); Giulia Bellinetti, Georges Uittenhout, and the rest of the team at M HKA (for essential technical support); Jake Dunagan (for inspiration); Jessica Charlesworth, Ilona Gaynor, the Toronto Uterati (for helpful conversations)

See also (last updated 16aug17):
- Features in VICE and Boing Boing
- Opinion piece in The Irish News on NurturePod and the future of parenting
- Bruce Sterling's repost of the interview above at Wired

- Article from Harpers Bazaar on what to see at A Temporary Futures Institute

- Video from ARTtube about ATFI (5 1/2 mins)
- Show summary from Belgian newspaper De Morgen (in Dutch)
- ATFI exhibition brochure (pdf)
- Two contemporary artists I greatly admire whose work has influenced this piece one way or another: Patricia Piccinini and Ron Mueck

Related:

> Impacting the Social 

> NaturePod

> Futures in the flesh 

> Ethnographic Experiential Futures
> Hawaii: The Lost Years

> Grand designs

> Foundfutures: Chinatown installation 

Chocolate, beer, and futures

The photo above, which I took this afternoon, is of an innovative calling card sent by our colleagues at Pantopicon, a consultancy based in Antwerp, Belgium.* It's a door hanger with a detachable set of advertisements for hypothetical future products, such as personalised medical plants, and mood-responsive t-shirts ... all at bargain basement prices! (If you earn Euros.)

Like HRCFS, Nik Baerten and team assist a variety of clients both local and international to envision and pursue preferred futures, and like us, as we learned last year, they take advantage of the imagination-catalysing potential of expressing possibilities in a range of media (which they refer to as 'experiencable futures' or 'futures experiences').

Take this elegantly simple still shot, for example:


Or this video ad:

Pantopicon has also made the occasional foray into user-generated content in the form of FFWD>> with a series of themed photoshop contests around a twenty-year future. (The example below was submitted for the theme "transport" by Gareth Davies.)


While this example is a few years old now, multimedia open source futures is really coming into its own -- as suggested in yesterday's post about design concepts; but also evidenced by the popularity of photoshop sites such as Worth1000, and the terrific cross-platform alternate reality game World Without Oil (previously mentioned here). Anyway, I hope Pantopicon will continue to engage people in this type of visual futures thinking.

Regular readers of t.s.f. are also encouraged to check out their blog, A Thousand Tomorrows, which tracks similar themes and, while internationally oriented, gives a stronger sense of the pulse of futures work in Europe.

You know, they might technically live in a low country, but from what I can tell the Belgians somehow see further than most... ;)

Keep up the good work, guys!

* Actually, it was a New Year's greeting that has been sitting in Jake's mailbox for several months -- he returned to Hawaii yesterday from self-imposed exile for dissertation writing purposes. Aloha Jake.

Futures found in Brussels

These images were produced by students in the advertising department at Sint-Lukas College [English site] in Brussels in the first term of 02006. Their assignment was create a visual awareness-raising campaign around Greenpeace themes, i.e., environmental activism. Many of the results are quite striking; and some highlights appear here with commentary [in italics] courtesy of Belgian futurist Maya van Leemput, who passed these along (regular readers of t.s.f. have met her before). Thanks, Maya!

Hello futures finders,

Found some futures for the collection.

"John-from-Ghent" is the name of seagull type bird, the obituary states:"With great sadness we announce the passing away of john-from-ghent. Seabird at the beach of Mar de Fora. Born in Sagres on May 25 1995 and suddenly deceased in Mar de Fora on November 21st 2002 following an oil spill. To testify your sympathy, you can transfer money to the accountnumber...."
An ordinary residential street in Belgium, prepared for rising sea-levels:


Two signs with the names of small towns in Belgium:
"Baraque Michel" is the highest point in our little low country.

"Kapellen-in-the-Wood" becomes "Kapellen-in-the-Wood-at-Sea".

The price of space-suits:

The text below says: "400 million tons a year, that is the amount of chemicals added globally every year. You would move to Mars or the Moon for less."

Most of [these are] just images, except for the first two which count as (film) posters (like a postcard is an object, something other than merely the actual image on its front). The death notice might count as an object also if it was presented and sent in an envelope or printed among the obituaries in the newspaper (which it wasn't). Anyway, some of the other images show objects that in 3-D would count as future artifacts, others just show images of what a future might be like.

The archive from which these images are drawn can be found here (N.B. text in Flemish).

So, a few thoughts. As Maya suggests, none of these function strictly as future artifacts. The "Greenpeace" branding immediately breaks the fourth wall, so to speak, in all these cases, and there is a certain lack of diegetic coherence -- e.g., even were it not for the brand name, the savage irony of the film posters belies their ostensible status as actual posters for future films, so the viewer is deprived of space to make the connection between the supposed artifact and the disturbing conclusion. The dots are, forcibly, joined up for us.

Still, features they could be said to have in common with such artifacts are: futures orientation expressed through an implicit future setting (except the obituary); evocation of some relevant issue or trend; and dissonance in the design (something impossible, unfamiliar, or futuristic that doesn't "fit" today).

The talented artists who produced these, I hasten to acknowledge, were briefed to make a visual campaign, not "artifacts from the future" per se, so lest these comments seem gratuitously critical, my aim is merely to think with these examples (and others of their ilk) about how best to use design to provoke futures thinking. Still, it's interesting, I think, that future artifacts of this sort are not uncommon as a strategy in environmental awareness-raising (compare with these previous examples). Both raising and acting on our awareness are things we need to get very good at -- the sooner, the better.