Smithsonian’s New Digital Guide Brings the Future to Your Fingertips

What will your life will be like in 2050? How do we care for a future that we cannot even imagine? A new digital experience from the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building (AIB) will introduce you to the ideas, objects, and inventions that could transform your future.

'Your Future Guide' is a first-of-its-kind digital experience that brings the milestone “FUTURES” exhibition - the Smithsonian’s first exploration of the future - to audiences everywhere. Brought to life through a groundbreaking new mix of machine learning and storytelling, AIB’s official future guide of 2050 will be available beginning June 22 at yourfutureguide.si.edu.

'FUTURES' showcases more than 150 awe-inspiring objects, ideas, prototypes and installations that fuse art, technology, design and history to help visitors imagine many possible futures on the horizon. 'Your Future Guide' is designed as a gift to carry FUTURES beyond the walls of AIB and inspire millions more to think more hopefully and flexibly about the world to come. 

Designed in partnership with award-winning advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), 'Your Future Guide' helps people imagine the future by giving them a tour of it. The project is based on research that shows that most Americans struggle to think more than 30 years into the future, but it is exactly that type of long-term thinking that enables us to focus on solutions and the future we desire. Empathy and the ability to envision that future, to see oneself in it, are key.

“We are much more likely to care about a future in which we can see ourselves,” said Rachel Goslins, director of the AIB. “Through the magic of these cutting-edge technologies, we are able to give users the otherworldly experience of time-traveling to a possible future. That experience can lead all of us to being more engaged citizens and better creative problem solvers.”

'Your Future Guide' begins by learning more about you today and the type of future you would like to see through a series of fun, engaging personality questions. Behind the scenes, a selection tool works to curate a personalized set of ideas and inventions from 'FUTURES' to explore for a tour. Ranging from sustainable foods to cryopreservation to the future of transit, these fascinating objects showcase solutions to some of society’s most pressing issues and goals. By bringing museum objects to life in an immersive environment that imagines objects as if they exist in 2050, users are able to come face-to-face with a firsthand experience with futures that were previously unimaginable.

After touring a possible future with Smithsonian’s official guide, users can make a real-world commitment to help shape the future into one that they want. This commitment can be downloaded and shared with others via social media.

“The insight that people are more likely to care about a future they can see themselves in led to an ambitious idea, which we brought to life through a first-of-its-kind technology experience,” said Margaret Johnson, chief creative officer at GS&P. “‘Your Future Guide’ revolutionizes how people interact with museum exhibitions and how they think about the future.”

“It’s been thrilling to partner with Goodby Silverstein & Partners and multiple teams of innovative thinkers on this new leap in Smithsonian virtual learning,” Goslins said.

To create 'Your Future Guide', GS&P worked with leading creative production studio Unicorns & Unicorns, software developer Resemble AI, non-profit think tank The Institute for the Future, and teams of dozens of other collaborators and AIB curators were involved in creating and assessing the experience’s ideas and expressions.

“‘Your Future Guide’ is experimental yet accessible,” said Brad MacDonald, director of digital media at AIB. “It engages digital visitors on a personal and collective level while pushing the boundaries of what a museum exhibition can be.”