Futures: Smithsonian Arts + Industries building

Director of Creative Media, Digital Curator

For its 175th anniversary, the Smithsonian is looking forward. What do you think of when you think of the future? FUTURES is the first building-wide exploration of the future on the National Mall. Designed by the award-winning Rockwell Group, FUTURES spans 32,000 square feet inside the Arts + Industries Building. On view until July 6, 2022, FUTURES is your guide to a vast array of digital interactives, artworks, technologies, and ideas that are glimpses into humanity’s next chapter. You are, after all, only the latest in a long line of future makers.

I was the Director of Creative Media and a member of the curatorial team, working with our staff and directly with partners to develop a number of projects. These partners included Games for Change, Autodesk, SoftBank, Goodby Silverstein & Parnters, and more. The exhibition was an enormous team effort and so many people contributed to the project that its impossible to say I was the sole owner or creator for any single piece within the exhibit but, below, are two featured projects that were primary areas of my focus.

YOUR FUTURE GUIDE

Developed in partnership with Goodby Silverstein and Partners

Deep fakes, AI, and the ability to talk to yourself from 30 years in the future.

What do you see when you imagine the year 2050? What will the world look like? Where might we live? How will we feed ourselves? How do we care for a future that we can’t even imagine? Lots of questions, but who can answer them? Your Future Guide, a first-of-its-kind digital museum interactive combining technology with Smithsonian storytelling, introduced over 8,000 people to the year 2050 from June through September 2022. I was an AIB stakeholder in the development of this project, identifying objects to focus on from the exhibition, and shaping how those objects were described within the Your Future Guide experience.

Webby Award Winner 2023
Best Narrative Experience: Metaverse, Immersive & Virtual

Future communities and The co-lab

Partnered with Autodesk

A multiplayer interactive, mediated by AI, to help people with differing goals design an equitable urban space.

Design shapes billions of lives. What if we could invite everyone to create, together, almost every aspect of their own communities? The Co-Lab is a first-of-its-kind opportunity to engage with other FUTURES visitors and an artificial intelligence (AI) partner to solve complex design problems. Play as the Ecologist, Developer, or Mayor - each with their own, distinct, design goals. Build skyscrapers and parks, get carbon-neutral, increase public services, or create more jobs while the AI partner solves conflicts for you in ways you may not expect, faster than the human brain can process. This collaborative design experience developed with Autodesk, a leading provider of 3D design software, was housed in the first large-scale public structure in a museum designed with generative AI. At 22ft tall, the structure is unique, lightweight, and assembled with entirely sustainable materials.

 I worked with Autodesk to define the player roles, advise on the UI/UX, and participate in user testing.

FUTURES Beacons

Funded by SoftBank, developed by the LAB at Rockwell Group

An interactive showcase of future tech - gesture control, holograms, ultrasonic haptic feedback - that is fundamentally a study about power and agency that helps visitors articulate their values for the future.

Every day we make contributions to the future, often quietly. Those actions shape the future and eventually frame how we see the world. Still, it’s hard to imagine what comes next when we’re stuck in today. FUTURES Beacons asks visitors to begin exercising the muscles and developing the habits that make us better at thinking about what comes next. They pave the way for us to see new possibilities everywhere. 

Each Beacon invites you to a conversation about the future you want to see for yourself, your community, and the world, all inspired by the objects around you. Your personal values and ideas, speculative headlines from the future you’re creating, and moment-to-moment insights about how your responses compare to others are all part of this new museum experience. As you leave, you’ll see yourself reflected in this new future, along with insights on the futures we most want and possible future timelines.

To create FUTURES Beacons, designers LAB at Rockwell Group layered emerging technologies not yet seen together—massively-scaled LED displays, holograms, video games, multiplayer interactions, data visualization, and intuitive ultrasonic haptic controls that let you to gesture mid-air to select choices on screen, creating the illusion of touch without making contact.

The FUTURES Beacons script is grounded in research from the Institute for the Future (IFTF) around storytelling tools that help people to imagine the future more clearly and empathize with citizens of the future. The concept is called “specificity training,” a form of mental time travel to get the brain to imagine what doesn’t yet exist. This imagination training can help us build authentic hope for the future, even in the face of urgent global challenges like pandemic recovery and climate change.

The project is made possible by SoftBank Group Corp, one of the world’s largest global technology investors. SoftBank invests in companies using artificial intelligence and transformational technologies with a goal to positively impact the way people work, live and play. 

I co-conceptualized  the project, oversaw design and development, worked with developers to conceive of the interaction models/UX, wrote the script, and contributed to the design of the underlying study.