End of the Year Swimsuit Spectacular Booklet

Do these selfies taken by two people who don’t know each other give us a glimpse of the future? Will the ever-increasing use of technological devices reconfigure our bodies? Will it affect our posture even in the most banal situations?

Those are some of the questions we asked in Mobile Ordinary Gestures, a booklet that describes a typology of gestures and postures adopted when using smartphones. Without claiming completeness, this selection represents a pictorial archive documenting people intriguing interactions with mobile technology.

Similar to Curious Rituals, we use this type of visual ethnography as signals of change of the present from which to extrapolate when designing futures. The documentation of this current body language can also inform the adaptation of current interfaces, or the creation of products that can support, help or benefit from the gestures and rituals we found.

Get a free digital PDF from our shop, or purchase a normal, human, non-streaming, non-downloading, non-data-using media “hardcopy” through Lulu.com

Paperback by Nicolas Nova (Near Future Laboratory) in collaboration with Constance Delamadeleine (Future Neue)
Publisher: The Near Future Laboratory
Published: October 1, 2016
Language: English
Pages: 68

Design Fiction at the Design Museum

This week we have taken over The Design Museum of London’s Instagram feed. We did this in coordination with the publication of our Ikea Catalog (of the Near Future) for The Design Museum’s current exhibition, “Home Futures” — running until March 2019.

We created eight tiny “Design Fictions” (two of them will appear as Instagram Stories — so keep an eye out..they may be the best ones) that will appear in their feed.

Why did we create these? Aside from the unique opportunity to work with the Design Museum, it gave us an opportunity to do what we enjoy the most: creating meaningful design fictions that reflect upon the challenges of life in today’s weird worlds. Those reflections are meant to be engaging enough that designers of all kinds, which does not include “technologists” nor “business managers” — will consider that their ideas for tomorrow may actually be really shitty, and they should go back to their workstations and workshops and try harder to make products, services, experiences that stand a better change of making a more habitable near future.

We look at design fiction as a form of extrospection — looking from today to see possible near futures based on present state. What might the world look like tomorrow if the assumptions about what’s “new” projected into the future? What are the procedures and methods by which we can project into the near future a new product idea or service strategy — and learn about where the idea might work really well, or how the service strategy could go horribly wrong?

Design Fiction is one of the ways we work with our partners and clients to learn from the future and apply those learnings and insights to make better decisions.

We hope you enjoy these little Design Fictions the Near Future Laboratory created for the Design Museum. You can see the full slate on the Near Future Laboratory’s Vimeo channel.

We encourage you to reach out to us and learn more.