The real futurist’s refrigerator

[Julian Bleecker deconstructs some of the endless “kitchen of the future” design exercises](http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2011/05/14/kitchen-of-the-future/) and comes away with some interesting insights for better conceptual design.

> I wonder about the various settings and contexts used to re-imagine what the world might be like in the future. Often times those contexts, objects, environments are associated with what wealthy people would like for themselves in order to drive sales of new stuff…

> Big change — those things should be consistent with the real, global, epic-scale challenges to living in the near future world — which have nothing to do with a refrigerator that lets you know you need more damn milk…

> This idea of every-increasing efficiency would be consistent with the Jetson’s kitchen from the old fantastic cartoon…

> I think this example of [the Ikea kitchen](http://www.designtaxi.com/news/32760/IKEA-Unveils-Kitchen-of-the-Future-and-it-s-Alive/?page=4) also embodies the challenges of future-fying anything well. Too much fetish of the object and very specific, naive and — old fashioned — ideas about what people want in the future. ((Isn’t that ironic.))…

> It drives me nuts that entities with the ability to bring about real, substantive change in the world bother to spend their money with this crap that’ll just be torn down after the annual investors meeting or the stupid trade show is over.

My takeaways: don’t stop at the generic, everyday solutions when you’re wielding your futurist tools. Take your powers to the world’s real problems or bring the world’s real problems to everyday objects (as Julian writes, a typical kitchen could be an interesting place to explore issues like climate change, water and energy scarcity, civil turmoil, etc). IDEO did this well with their [Living Climate Change](http://www.ideo.com/work/living-climate-change) series.

And no more smart refrigerators, please. We get it already.