Breaking the 4th Wall

By Futurity Systems

In 2043, the world will be a different place. How will our lifestyles change? How long will we live? Will we still face disease the same way we do now? How will the workforce look? What new technologies will we have in our homes? What about our clothing, our food, our travel, even our habits and well being? These are all questions that we’ll be exploring in this speculative future lifestyle magazine inTENSE created by Futurity Systems.

inTENSE offers a dress rehearsal of different possible futures to help you imagine what life could be like in 2043.

In the theater, walls one, two, and three are the back and sides of the stage’s scenery. The “fourth wall” is the one between the stage and the audience, and playwrights and actors are cautioned against breaking it –by addressing the audience directly, coming out of character, or revealing the mechanisms behind the props, for example – lest they remind the viewers that it’s all just an act. InTENSE is a bit like a play, set in the future but addressing the present, and we do want to share with you how it was made:

While all images in Issue #1 were synthetic, in this issue we use some real photographs in the following articles: “New Technologies are Competing to Win the Race to Repair and Replace Our Organs,” and the Digemini Moralgorithms ad.

All other images are generated with Midjourney.

Additionally, Innovation consultants and Futures strategists at EY, David Huntington and Phil Park contributed the full advertisement (copy and art direction) for Digemini Moralgorithms.

The ChatGPT 4 texts have a tiny robot icon at the bottom of the page, and all illustrations (synthographs as coined by Elke Reinhuber) come as generated from multiple versions and releases of the algorithm v5.1 and 5.2 untouched and unphotoshopped.

“This present moment used to be the unimaginable future,” said Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, and most of the articles take their seed in technologies and trends that are visible – some faint, some ubiquitous – in labs, art, politics, and restaurants today. InTENSE is an example of our artifacts – props brought back from the future so we can experience and debate them now, in a quest to build better futures, faster. Our goal as Future Synthesists is to take the patterns of innovation that we study, and apply them to today’s people, processes, products, and places – so we all can imagine that unimaginable future a bit more clearly, vividly, and actively.

As the future arrives, seemingly early and unannounced again, we also want inTENSE to become a documentation of the development of these technologies. As we take this issue to publishing, there are strident debates about the future of human graphic designers and writers; the ethics of AI and the metaverse; even about the nature of truth and intelligence.

We’ve learned a lot in the process of making it, about how humans and all of our inventions are starting a remarkable new age of cocreation.

We love sharing the stories, and we’re happy to have you along on the trip!

Break down problem spaces into constituent parts, quantifying the components and understanding relationships via our data driven Futurity Science Tools ANALYZE FUTURES

Test the artefacts in lab conditions, with users / customers, or in the market

Design new solutions by adding, subtracting, rearranging, and taking other actions on the parts via our design methodology

Synthesizng Futures

SYNTHESIZE FUTURES

ENGINEER FUTURES

Build the designed solutions, in the form of conceptual, experiential, or functional ar tefacts and prototypes