Life in 2050 is shaped by three overarching “macro-trends”: the climate crisis the ageing population and the “fourth Industrial Revolution”, which will see data-gathering technology infiltrate our most intimate spaces. And there’s lodger Charlie, 34, who has cerebral palsy and works for a protein manufacturer based in Buenos Aires. There’s grandperson Mo, 76, a retired teacher with early-onset dementia who pines for the good old days. There’s Kai, 17, who works for a 3D printing company, hangs out in the metaverse and has never eaten meat (and can’t understand why anyone would).
The exhibition, produced in collaboration with University College London, imagines a home inhabited by three (gender-neutral) people. “But it will be messy as we learn to navigate the huge benefits and ethical questions that new interactive technologies bring.” “The home of the future could help us flourish in ever more tailored and sophisticated ways,” she says. She is behind the forthcoming Tomorrow’s Home exhibition at the Museum of the Home in east London, which imagines how we’ll be living three decades hence. Maybe a bit of both, says Sarah Douglas, director of the Liminal Space. So much for the home of 2021! What about the home of 2050? Might it offer a more hopeful vision of domesticity than the dystopian nightmare some of us have been living through these past couple of years? Or are we inexorably sliding into a world of surveillance and atomisation, climate crisis and housing crisis, drowning alone as our meta headsets suck the very data from our souls? She catches the news: the world’s richest man has just left the Earth’s atmosphere. Her pocket surveillance device reminds her to water them. Filled with saudade for the dying world outside, she has bought a few rainforest plants to brighten the space. A motion sensor on her wrist reminds her to optimise her performance. There is a communal kitchen down the corridor, which she shares with a few strangers she met online, but mostly she orders her meals via an interface and eats them here. The government has made it illegal for her to step outside. The room’s fleshy inhabitant, confined indoors by a zoonotic pandemic, greenwashes a data-mining company from her bed. I magine, if you can, a small, bluish room.
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