FUTURES Beacons
Create, debate, and shape a future of your own making with FUTURES Beacons, a first of its kind, large-scale interactive that combines game design, research into the psychology of future thinking, and cutting-edge technology. Find this playful layer of digital storytelling in the form of 10-foot-tall LED installations strategically placed throughout the building.
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 ask us 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 will invite 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.
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