Sony has recently launched an exhibition titled “One Day, 2050, Sci-fi Prototyping” which aims to propose new possible futures for technology. The program has been created in collaboration with Wired Sci-Fi Prototyping Lab, an institute that employs science-fictional writing and imagination to support and implement businesses and understand how they can contribute to the future.
The technique used for the creation of these futuristic technologies is called Sci-Fi prototyping and it refers to the process of using fictional writing to fabricate possible futures reconstructed with a backwords process of predictions. Through this, Sony is able to expand its creative ideas and challenge the existing innovative arsenal of technologies it produced, responding to Wired Sci-Fi Prototyping Lab’s clients’: “I want employees to have a future-oriented mindset. I want to look into the future of my company and explore areas of research and development that I should work on. I want to redefine my vision and mission in an era when the future is difficult to see”.
Sony held these workshops to investigate the possibilities of irrationality and to imagine Tokyo in 2050, combining romance and technology that generated futuristic ways of living, habitats and political and environmental scenarios. “One Day, 2050, Sci-fi Prototyping” produced four technological solutions paired with four science fiction stories that contextualise them into society; these narratives serve to highlight how people today are laying the basis for an uncertain and complex future that will need designers to play a major role in decrypting the issues that will come.