JUDY WOODRUFF: Question: What
will the future look like?
That's a big question
posed by a new exhibition
at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Eighty
designers from around
the world have put their
imaginations to work to
address both the anxieties
and excitement over the
possibilities brought by
innovation and new technology.
Jeffrey Brown visits the museum
as part of our ongoing arts
and culture series, Canvas.
JEFFREY BROWN: It's usually the
stuff of sci-fi films, books
and cartoons, but now the future
is on display at a new
design exhibition at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
KATHY HIESINGER, Philadelphia
Museum of Art: We want people
to find their own paths.
JEFFREY BROWN: Kathy Hiesinger
co-curator of Designs
for Different Futures.
KATHY HIESINGER: The idea of
the show is to make us think
of, you know, who we are as
human beings and how we relate
to each other and to the
world around us, and what that
means in terms of both
design and the future.
JEFFREY BROWN: But why
is design a good way
to explore the future?
KATHY HIESINGER: Design today
now encompasses more than
making chairs or simple physical
objects. Designers
collaborate, as the show
demonstrates, with scientists,
with anthropologists,
with sociologists,
biochemists, across all fields.
JEFFREY BROWN: Divided into 11
sections, the exhibit explores
innovative ideas, often mixing
high tech with the natural
world, textiles made of seaweed,
artificial organ implants,
even a robotic baby feeder.
It offers hope, inspires fear,
and asks ethical questions
about the choices involved.
How will our clothes be made?
Who will be watching us? And how
might we hide from surveillance?
How and what will we eat? That
was the focus for Orkan Telhan,
an artist and designer at
the University of Pennsylvania.
His display, titled
Breakfast Before Extinction,
offers several futuristic
meals that may or
may not whet your appetite,
3D-printed pancakes, genetically
modified salmon and, strangest
of all, steak made from
our own blood cells.
ORKAN TELHAN, University of
Pennsylvania: In the future,
imagine you receive a kit coming
to your house, where you can
get a little kit where you
can take your cells from your
body.
JEFFREY BROWN: My own cells.
ORKAN TELHAN: Your own cells,
almost like getting a swab
from your cheek, putting them
into a little dish, where you
let them incubate for, you know,
six, eight weeks, so that you
can have your little meat,
which you can consume by
yourself in front of...
JEFFREY BROWN: And
I'm eating myself?
ORKAN TELHAN: Yourself. Yes,
you're eating yourself. And
so no animals are harmed.
JEFFREY BROWN: And why
do I want to do -- why
do I want to do that?
ORKAN TELHAN: First of all,
it's the most sustainable
way of making food.
I'm not saying this -- it's
going to be a replacement for
all your protein needs, but
making you think about, you
know, do we need to kill an
animal to be able to feed this?
JEFFREY BROWN: Scarcity and
diminished resources are coming,
he says. It's up to us to make
some difficult choices.
ORKAN TELHAN: This is not
about, oh, this is a solution
for it. But maybe we can, you
know, change certain things, and
then maybe avoid this future.
JEFFREY BROWN: The exhibition's
top celebrity was found in
the jobs section, where Quori,
a robot designed by a team
including architect Simon Kim
mimics basic human movement.
Kim says an enormous amount
of thinking goes into the look
and feel of the robot and how
that will impact our
interactions with it.
SIMON KIM, University of
Pennsylvania: It is meant to be
a genderless robot. So there's
great pains in the design
to maintain the kind of not
only male or female traits.
JEFFREY BROWN: Why is that?
SIMON KIM: It's a large
issue in the human-robot
interaction community.
So, if it's taller than us,
if it's bigger than us, if it
looks aggressive, these are
things that, in our perception,
turn us away from the robot,
whereas the robot is meant
to be helpful. We might
not engage at all.
JEFFREY BROWN: Here, Quori
performs simple gestures, but
it can be programmed to do more,
including things that
could raise fears of the
machine's power over us.
SIMON KIM: So, it takes more
than just smart engineering
or smart design, but it's also
going to take, you
know, somebody who can
work psychologically
to make sure that the
rules for which we hope these
robots occupy work with us,
so that we're not turned off,
nor do we think so negatively
about the robot that we don't
assign it any role at all.
JEFFREY BROWN: The exhibition
includes a futures therapy lab,
where visitors can digest and
contemplate their experience.
Emily Schreiner is a
curator for public programs.
EMILY SCHREINER, Philadelphia
Museum of Art: A lot of people
come in with their eyes really
wide. They have just seen a lot.
They have experienced a lot.
But this is a space that
has people and paper and
books, and that has been
sort of a hyper-analog
counterpoint to a very dizzying
perspective of the future.
JEFFREY BROWN: People gather
in the lab to read from the
crowdsourced library, make art,
and listen to designers
talk about their work.
Wendy Rosenfield felt
a range of emotions.
WENDY ROSENFIELD, Visitor: It
actually gave me a little bit
of anxiety walking through,
just like how quickly
everything's changing
and how much technology
and the development
of technology even
plays into that.
JEFFREY BROWN: Curators hope
to inspire visitors to reflect
on the human condition, how we
can design better solutions, and
also recognize our own agency.
KATHY HIESINGER: In
today's climate, political,
environmental, the
present seems to be very
urgent. And making decisions
that will affect the future seem
more important now than ever.
JEFFREY BROWN: In a
show like this allows
us to think about that.
KATHY HIESINGER: I hope so.
And I think there are many
projects here that show what can
be done or speculate about
where we could go in the future.
JEFFREY BROWN: The exhibition
Designs for Different Futures
is here through March 8,
before traveling to
Minneapolis and Chicago.
For the "PBS NewsHour,"
I'm Jeffrey Brown at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And some
of it, we have never
thought about before.