Institute For The Future

Food Innovation: Recipes for the Next Decade

ARTIFACTS FROM THE FUTURE—Tangible, Concrete, Experiential

Read coverage of these artifacts in Fast Company »

Imagine that you could take an archaeologist’s expedition to the future to collect objects and fragments of text or photos to understand what daily life will be like in 10, 20, or 50 years. Artifacts from the Future give us this tangible experience of the future. They make the details of a scenario concrete, helping us to understand, almost first-hand, what it will be like to live in a particular future.

Artifacts from the Future may take dozens of forms, from the familiar bumper sticker to labels for the food we eat to future credit card statements. They can be 3D objects, like product containers, or videos that give us the physical experience of wearing augmented reality glasses as we walk down a street. These familiar objects of everyday life help us translate today's trends and signals into intimate future experiences—and these experiences, in turn, increase our capacity to draw on our intuitive intelligence when making decisions about the future.

Artifacts are at-a-glance tools for exploring a fundamental question: What is possible?

The following six Artifacts from the Future are snapshots of what might emerge if certain forecasts about the future of food materialize. They were developed as part of our research for Food Innovation: Recipes for the Next Decade—a book of "recipes" on how to create systems-level change across the food system. Enjoy!

• Explore the Food Innovation: Recipes for the Next Decade report »

About the IFTF Food Futures Lab

The Food Futures Lab at Institute for the Future cultivates a community of changemakers who use food as a medium for transformation. We draw connections across their stories to forecast unexpected possibilities for the global food system, and we provide them with tools for thinking about the kinds of futures they’re building. Using methodologies developed over nearly 50 years, we challenge assumptions and reveal new opportunities to make a resilient, equitable, and delicious future of food.

For more information about the IFTF Food Futures Lab and Institute for the Future, please contact:

Food Futures Lab | [email protected] 

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