Three exhibitions this year have proved quite revealing in what they have to say about global attitudes towards the future. Most recently, I caught the Concorde exhibit at Manchester Airport. The Great Bird is parked in a hangar, elegant and poised. All dressed up but with nowhere to go. Rather than criss-crossing the world as it is still capable of doing, the plane is grounded by that good ol' one-two punch - bad economics and lack of imagination. Concorde's future is lost, for now at least.
A quite different experience with the brilliant Cold War Modern show at the V&A in London at the turn of the year. That show looked at the period from 1945-70 from a design perspective, detailing some amazing products and structures - from the mundane to the awe-inspiring - as well as a whole host of artefacts that never came to be. Cyborg technology, immense Soviet architecture, Buckminster Fuller's domed cities and space stations all shone briefly on the drawing board and then came to nothing. It was a glimpse into other worlds - one that I grew up in, and one that might have been, both shaped by the splitting of the atom.
Japan Car at London's Science Musuem was a look at more likely futures - one where cars are either inspired by the kei car concept or are capable of zero emissions. It featured the Honda FCX Clarity, the unbelievably kawaii Toyota IQ and some interesting GPS-data-as-art from Tokyo.
Past trips to the US revealed that Cog and Kismet, two innovative social robot projects from MIT in the 90s and early 2000s, are already exhibited at the MIT Museum just outside Boston. At times it seems as if our future utopias are really destined to be just future museum exhibits. Relics of eras that falter once past the concept stage. One can easily imagine that we might find ourselves wandering through exhibits in 20 or 30 years, marvelling at Asimo or the Repliee androids, contemplating another world that might have been.
Concorde
Toyota iQ
Toyota iReal
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