This Time Tomorrow

This Time Tomorrow was an exhibition design project that combined scenography and museology to explore how future facing narratives could operate in bespoke narrativised spaces in order to share new knowledge about the 4th industrial revolution at the World Economic Forum 2016.

Research (in collaboration with V&A curators) resulted in a broad range of international art and design outputs being considered from sustainable, critical and reflective socially engaged projects in order to produce a project that was situated within a critical design context. The exhibition design drew on cinematic and theatrical canons to continue work surrounding the use of narratological tropes in the display and communication of complex ideas, emerging technological objects and educational experiences.

Through a complicated collaborative effort, we combined research in historic diorama design, the language of science fiction film and theatre sets, wunderkammer, and contemporary immersive environments in order to work with the thematic briefs of the V&A and World Economic Forum. Using storytelling as a design tool, enabled conversations to open up between the V&A and our studio to develop the final 3d designs.

The outcome was a series of built environments, which focused on a journey through scale in a series of six walk-through scenes. These acted as stages for the various objects where connections could be made and stories could be imagined about the impact that technology will have on sustainability, privacy, mortality and politics. The exhibition featured artworks and design objects ranging from the scale of DNA to the distant horizon of outer space, forming a landscape of clues and questions about the world of tomorrow.

The project was part of the 2016 World Economic Forum and showcased to 3000 invited guests – it was used to cultivate conversations around the notion of the 4th industrial revolution and acted as an immediate confrontation for visitors to the forum.