Smithsonian AIB: Futures

Director of Creative Media

AIB welcomed 650,000 visitors to the first and largest exploration of the future on the National Mall. From an air taxi to fish skin fashion, a space sail to a tree burial pod, and a hyperloop to a wetland that cleaned clothes, FUTURES was your guide to a vast array of interactives, artworks, technologies, and ideas that are glimpses into humanity’s next chapter. I was involved in concepturalization, design and project management for three key components, and partnership, for the exhibition: the Futures Beacons, the Autodesk Co-Lab, and Your Future Guide.

 

Futures Beacons

Future Agents shared more than 1 million insights into their vision of the future. We studied the data and we’re excited to share that after visiting FUTURES, 83% could imagine a better future and 80% felt inspired to take action. We also learned some fun factoids, like that we think teleportation will be our “future superpower” and a universal language will unite people most effectively (an extraterrestrial invasion was a close second.

An exhibit and a Futures study

The Futures Beacons were both a futuristic tech showcase and also a meaningful study, designed to anonymously track visitor perspective on the future: their values, their beliefs, their hopes and fears. We worked directly with the Institute of the Future to design questions that were approachable, centered the visitor beliefs and could be parsed for data visualization and analysis. In a first-of-its-kind partnership for a cultural institution, AIB is sharing what it learned publicly and with the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a leading research and educational organization devoted to future studies. This will inform the next phase of IFTF’s field-leading work, supported by analysis from global cultural audience research firm Morris Hargreaves McIntyre and exhibition technologists the LAB at Rockwell Group.

FUTURES by the numbers:

  • 650,000 visitors

  • Visitors felt more HOPEFUL than EMPOWERED

  • 65,000 action commitments made for a better future

  • 97% of visitors reported a shift after visiting in mindset or emotion about the future

  • 77% of people reported feeling more hopeful about the future after seeing FUTURES 

  • 80% reported being inspired to take action, as well as feeling a sense of increased responsibility for shaping the future

If you want to look at the future with hope instead of fear, try these key FUTURES takeaways:

  • Seek out potential solutions to future issues that worry you the most. You might just feel more motivated to do something to make them come true.

  • When you find something that excites you about the future (an idea, invention, or social movement), imagine how it might play out over the next 30 years. The more imagination you bring, the more you can visualize pathways to achieve it.

  • Look for or create examples of people coming together to solve problems. Apply future thinking to community solutions and you may find yourself feeling more hopeful about tomorrow.

 

Autodesk Co-Lab

We partnered with Autodesk to explore how people might design a more sustainable and equitable future using generative design, a form of AI that uses design goals and requirements to generate many potential solutions in order to create better outcomes. The Co-Lab featured a one-of-a-kind structure designed by Autodesk Research using generative design, as well as a multi-player interactive experience called Future Communities, built on Autodesk technology, which invites visitors to work together to design a community with the help and suggestions of AI.

Prototyping future communities

Future Communities was an interactive experiment exploring how multiple stakeholders with different objectives and limited resources can collaborate and make trade-offs that lead to greener cities, commercial vibrancy, efficient spaces for people to live and work, and fair distribution of services to all residents.  

 
 

Your Future Guide

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.

To create Your Future Guide, the Smithsonian’s Arts + Industries Building team worked with award-winning advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners for creative development and leading creative production studio Unicorns & Unicorns. Multiple teams of other collaborators, including software developer Resemble AI and non-profit think tank Institute for the Future, were involved in creating and assessing Your Future Guide’s ideas and expressions. The result is an experience that revolutionizes how you can interact with a museum exhibition.