The New York-based design duo behind Extrapolation Factory hosted a pop-up workshop yesterday afternoon in our own pop-up space here—everything popping up!— at the Gizmodo Home of the Future in New York City, where a group of twenty or so participants put together visions of the domestic objects of tomorrow.
The design process itself was awesome to watch and is unique to Elliott Montgomery and Chris Woebken, the organizational forces behind Extrapolation Factory. The exact steps are different every time, but, for this instance, they set up a grid of recent news stories chosen mostly from the sciences, with a heavy emphasis on biotechnology.
These are then fed into a sheet of parameters about the "phantom residents" of the Home of the Future.
Each resident was defined by and through a speculative object that would be later associated with them, but one invented by the workshop participant based on one of the news items, seen above.
Normally, the results of this sort of fictional object creation could be extended over the course of an entire design studio, but everything had to be compressed into a 3-hour slot at the Home of the Future.
The resulting objects were thus discussed, sketched, pinned up as short narratives, and then assembled from cut paper and vinyl, resulting in a little gallery of domestic objects of the near future, temporarily put on display throughout the house.
These "futuring workshops" have taken place everywhere from Storefront for Art and Architecture, where they designed junk mail from the future, to a bodega where they stocked the shelves with fake 99¢ products from an alternative tomorrow for New York City, as you can watch in the following video.
They appear to be developing some sort of portable super-futuring kit, as well, but I didn't have a chance to ask them about it yesterday; keep your eye out for a boxed futuring workshop popping up in a living room near you. [Extrapolation Factory]
The workshop was run with help from Natsuki Hayashi and Parsons Transdisciplinary Design students Stephanie Beattie, Selim Budeyri, Leah Cabrera Fischer, Dongin Shin, Lillian Tong, and Mollie West.