Saturday 16 August 2014

mail-order or to be determined

BLDGBlog shares a glimpse of New Future Lab's latest print catalog that offers a dizzying array of products and services for shoppers in an imagined near future.

It draws on science-fiction and the speculations (and warnings) of futurists to imagine the marketing and packaging of some life-enhancing merchandise. The description of some of the items is appropriately tongue-in-cheek and there's a healthy bit of circumspection here vis-ร -vis our own consumption and buying patterns, but a lot of these visions, gimmicks—neither too dark nor too utopian and post-commercial—could be realised in a few years time, perhaps kick-started by this very catalog. Though I am sort leagues better, it makes me think of those sleek, with some sort of retro-feeling, catalogs of promising, luxurious gadgets that they have on airplanes, which seem to always make for good reading-material.