Can a bin know what was put in it?
Human Futures — speculative wing
What comes after the smartphone? Not technically. Culturally.
The smartphone solved communication, then became an attention machine. The next device shouldn't compete on specs. It should compete on how little of your life it occupies.
Everything in this room is labelled honestly: prototype, never manufactured, research only. Nothing here is a product, a roadmap or a promise.
People walk round thinking: why doesn't this exist?
Not a phone. Not glasses. Not a watch. It waits.
It only speaks when the world has something interesting to say. Deciding when that is remains the entire unsolved problem.
A flexible sheet. No apps. The folds are the interface.
Not impossible — flexible displays and printed electronics already exist. Durable, low-power and affordable at once is the engineering wall.
A smooth stone. No screen. No notifications.
No feed, no likes, nothing to return to. Whether people keep using an object with no reward loop is the open question.
Reverse augmented reality. It removes distraction instead of adding objects.
Subtraction is harder to demo than addition, which is probably why nobody builds it.
A physical object. Phones placed inside. It doesn't lock them.
A furniture problem disguised as a technology problem. No software required.
A paper book with tiny passive electronics inside. No screen.
The book stays paper. Only the atmosphere changes. Power, cost and not ruining the book are the constraints.
Children find them in museums, forests, beaches, gardens.
Adults start playing too. Cheap enough to lose is the design requirement.
Forget devices. The interface is the world.
The craziest one in the room, and the one that makes the other seven look like components.
GPS became infrastructure. Maps became infrastructure. Electricity became infrastructure.
None of them are entertainment. They are simply there when you need them and invisible when you don't.
The question underneath this whole room: can technology become infrastructure instead of entertainment?
How the lab is organised
Things we can sell.
Questions nobody has answered.
Not predictions. Experiments.
The purpose isn't to forecast the future. It's to ask: if we were designing civilisation again today, what would we build differently?
The idea underneath all of it
Not an invisible phone. Every object carrying small, focused intelligence — not to distract you, but to make the object itself better.
A watering can
teaches gardening
A piano
grows with a child
A battery
explains its own health
A museum bench
tells one story
A delivery van
quietly cooperates with nearby vans
A reusable bottle
remembers where you last refilled it
None of these are apps. They make the object more meaningful instead of pulling you back to a screen. More curiosity, more learning, more connection. Not more screen time.
