Institute For The Future

Artifacts from the Future

Tangible, Concrete, Experiential

Imagine that you could take an archaeologist’s expedition to the future to collect objects and fragments of text or photos to understand what daily life will be like in 10, 20, or 50 years. Artifacts from the Future give us this tangible experience of the future. They make the details of a scenario concrete, helping us to understand, almost first-hand, what it will be like to live in a particular future.

Artifacts from the Future may take dozens of forms, from the familiar bumper sticker to labels for the food we eat to future credit card statements. They can be 3D objects, like product containers, or videos that give us the physical experience of wearing augmented reality glasses as we walk down a street. These familiar objects of everyday life help us translate today's trends and signals into intimate future experiences—and these experiences, in turn, increase our capacity to draw on our intuitive intelligence when making decisions about the future.

Artifacts from the Future provide a rich starting point for strategic discussions, whether for a new products team in a technical organization or a community group looking for ways to engage young people in building a stake in their own neighborhood. Creating Artifacts from the Future is also a great way to get people thinking about the future—their assumptions, their goals, and the path from here to there. 

One way to start making your own artifacts is to use our Artifact Engine.

Consider this future:

Try refreshing the text a few times to find a future that resonates with you. 

Each Artifact is a snapshot of one possible object, frozen in time. It is a window into another world that is both familiar and novel. While these concepts may never exist outside of our imagination, they serve as a concrete starting point for discussing what is possible. They help us imagine a world in which the artifact would exist, and be used in everyday life. When we open our minds to these new possibilities, it allows us to better prepare for the future by addressing today’s challenges in more creative ways.

If something from the Artifact Engine inspires you, create a visualization of it and share it with us @IFTF #artifactfromthefuture