THE FUTURE, AS FORETOLD IN THE PAST GIORGIA LUPI

Today science fiction provides a reservoir of new ideas for start-ups. The philosopher Isabelle Stengers actually suggests we envisage science fiction as a ‘prospective’ form of the social sciences: “And what if works of science fiction designated (amongst other things) those things that the social sciences refuse to consider in the name of scientific solemnity: i.e. to envisage the present from the viewpoint of the many possibilities it contains? And what if writers of science fiction brought into existence, at each given period, the worlds that our imaginations can give consistence to?”

And such considerations led Giorgia Lupi to try and to visualise the long history of the future as it was predicted or feared in works set in the future. Here she depicts the future as a timeline presenting the scenarios that have come true, those which are no longer possible and those for which we still have to wait and see. The horizontal axis represents a timeline along which the events are organised chronologically according to the year they are supposed to happen. The vertical axis indicates the year the corresponding novel was published and the bottom half of the schema provides an explanation of the event.

Further layers of analysis have been added which categorise the type of predicted events, i.e. are they primarily social, scientific, technological or political; the genre of the book in question; and finally whether the events are positive, neutral and negative. The good news is that the world will still exist in 802,701!

Giorgia Lupi is an information designer. Her work in information visualization frequently crosses the divide between digital and print, exploring visual models and metaphors to represent dense and rich data-driven stories. After graduating in Architecture at Ferrara University in 2006 she has been involved in multidisciplinary projects on the information, technology and interaction design fields, using design and data visualization to convey complex systems of information. She is co-founder and design director at Accurat, a data-driven research, design and innovation firm based in Milan and New York.
http://giorgialupi.com/about/