A big idea with 6 connected futures
Your food, your forest, your future descendants. They have something to say.
A voice changes the relationship.
A sensor can report a condition. A voice creates an encounter. These futures explore what changes when people experience plants, animals, ecosystems and possible future people as someone they can address.
The voice can create companionship, turn an attraction into a conversation, or make a campaign emotionally different. It can also give a subject a way to bargain, object and remember.
The collection crosses different speculative premises. What connects them is the change in relationship—and the businesses, moral arguments and institutions that grow around it.
Add a brick only when the bricks below give a reason for it.
What if your next pet grew dinner?
ProblemSolution
The garden centre finally cracks the pet economy.
Many older people can’t walk a dog any more, and some won’t feed a pet meat.
Sensors and AI give the basil, the tomato and the root fungus a voice and a personality.
Planters that frown when the soil is dry already exist. Nobody bonds with a sensor.
Barry the root fungus trades nutrients for carbon, and favours whoever pays best.
The tomato shades the basil. Basil sulks. Pesto night is in three days.
Prune the tomato, bring Mexican night forward, add a pine and a chanterelle. Every choice changes tomorrow’s alliances.
A dead herb is forgivable. A companion that stops talking when its subscription lapses is not.
The basil isn’t speaking to the tomato.
Everyone expectsA smart planter tells you when to water.
A visit to the garden centre becomes a visit to a pet shop. AI and sensors give plants and fungi voices and personalities.
Follow how it could happenYour bacon has something to say.
Everyone expectsAI detects distress on farms.
AI decodes animal calls, and people hear what their dog, their cattle and their dinner are actually saying. It could be the most moving thing technology ever does.
Follow how it could happenThe forest would like a word.
Everyone expectsSensors monitor an ecosystem.
What if a walk through a forest became a conversation with the ecosystem around you? Sensors and AI no longer only report conditions.
Follow how it could happenMeet your child before deciding to have them.
Everyone expectsParents screen for inherited conditions.
A fertility service offers parents a conversation with a simulation of the adult their future child might become.
Follow how it could happenTomorrow puts your success in a museum of mistakes.
Everyone expectsWe preserve the record of our success.
A future society searches the records for the causes of its collapse. Purchases, flights, professional achievements and ordinary habits become material for a judgement…
Follow how it could happenDo we rescue them—or hire them cheap?
Everyone expectsA time gate lets us rescue our descendants.
A time gate connects us with people living in a damaged future. We have resources they need. They have labour we can buy cheaply.
Follow how it could happenCommission a paradigm exploration, a set of scenarios or a workshop with your team.