Bren O’Callaghan A Runaway at the Media Circus!

Radio 3 Festival of Free Thinking 06

The inaugural BBC Radio 3 Festival of Free Thinking took place in Liverpool during November 2006. A festival of live events, debates, conversation and meaty concepts-on-the-bone, a loose theme of ‘the future’ seemed a perfect match to enable us to play with visuals and live participation at the Big Screen.

In collaboration with The Institute for the Future, California - a leading global think-tank who peer into the looking glass at technological innovations-to-be, gauging how society will mutate across such diverse fields as business, health and daily life - Research & Design Manager Jason Tester created four series of photo-real artefacts of the near future intended to provoke and prompt further thought.

If Merlin were with us today, he’d be wielding an installation disc for Photoshop, not a wand. Using Jason’s designs, embedded within an interface created by our long-standing partners ICDC, questions appeared on screen accompanied by clearly defined zones into which the public were able to step to select and vote from a choice of 4 mystery answers to each question:

How will CCTV change and adapt within our cities? What are the cover stories of a gossip magazine in 2019? Which emerging food products will replace those of today? What advertisements will we be seeing in the future?

A clock counted down as the votes were collected; registered by stepping into a zone of choice and simply waving a hand. At the end of this period, the random option with the most votes appeared on screen; allowing observers a better grasp of what can be a mind-bending leap of faith via the seamless alteration of everyday sights and scenes – from food packaging to magazine covers, advertising posters to public information signs in the public realm.

As Jason puts it: “These visuals needed to be instantly captivating and quickly understood, but I wouldn’t sacrifice the importance of the trends and implications embodied–simultaneously fun and meaningful. Designing for this combination is actually my goal for all of IFTF’s futures-design work, but our content usually has the inherent advantage of a primed and interested audience.

“We can plop the viewer into the middle of a fictional situation, or use a decently sized chunk of text to drive home an important implication, or trust that they’ll engage with an illustration long enough to grasp the interplay of several important trends.

“I didn’t have these luxuries with my Liverpudlian audience. The pedestrians in Clayton Square were encountering the big screen without any context, and the artifacts-from-the-future I created for it had only a brief opportunity to impress, inform, and provoke before viewers walked on…” (more)