The namesake of this blog and my social media handles is Phillips Electronics Vision Of The Future(VOTF) concept developed in the mid 90s. Created during a time where corporations were still optimistic that their products value could genuinely improve customers lives and that the dangers of globalism should be approached cautiously came a series of conceptual design products that resemble much of the "smart" technology seen today. Products that were supposed to turn your home into a smart house that could automatically adjust to the users needs(Alexa,Siri?), wearable electronics predating the smartphone by about a decade, electronic screens that contained photo and audio "memories" like some kind of digital postcard. VOTF was an ambitious project that was only made possible by the time it found itself in, a time before the world wide web and apps dumbed down so that three year olds can get addicted to screens now. Vision of The Future could only have been imagined by a people who experienced the world before the flattening of the imagination cause by the world wide web. A time where technology was approached with unbridled optimism and not taken for granted as an extension of our lives, in many ways it was the wild west for these ideas, and although the decades that followed led to some of the most obscene censorship, dismantlement of net neutrality, and unprecedented attacks on personal freedom and privacy seen in the western world, the spirit of VOTF remains as a reminder what was once possible and what what might be possible again.
My blog is dedicated to design research from this period of time and attempts to recapture that flame so it can be reestablished in a new way. Design research for new design practices. Not in a hauntological sense where references are interpreted through the haze of notalgia but as a bulwark against the neverending tide of nihilism and hopelessness that plagues young people today. There is a sense that we are living at the end of history, everything is a remix and nothing original can possibly exist again, but it doesn't need to be this way.
Music is Macquaire Ridge by Boards of Canada a bonus track from the Japanese version of The Campfire Headphase(2005). Boards of Canada are a Scottish-Canadian electronic duo whose music has had a profound effect on the creation of this blog and whose track One Very Important Thought has become a sort of underlying philosophical guide for Vision Of The Future.
