Date Your Future: Love it or Hate it? Which vision of the future will you choose?

Our ideas about the future today are largely shaped by dystopian visions. There is simply a great deal to suggest that we humans have simply ruined our own chances of a positive future. Every day, the negative consequences of our actions are reflected back to us in the news, in entertainment programmes, in posts by commentators on digital platforms, and in corporate announcements. We seem to have accepted the picture that is emerging. We have no ‘eutopia’ because we no longer give any thought to a desirable social future.

“Date Your Future” is a Tinder-style installation featuring slightly exaggerated advertising campaigns for a possible future. The campaigns depict fictional scenes and products that – if we take our current trends to their logical conclusion – might well emerge. In a one-day experiment, people can use a screen to find a ‘match’ for a positive or negative future scenario amongst the adverts on display. To do so, people simply swipe right (‘Love it’) or left (‘Hate it’), just like on a well-known dating platform. The results of the participants’ preferences are presented in real time. Those involved in the project are already keen to see which scenarios are rejected and which are deemed to have positive potential.

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To design the advertisements for the exhibitions, we imagined various future scenarios. We thought about the important events that take place in a person’s life, such as birth, marriage or playing outdoors as a child. We then developed possible future scenarios for these milestones and fed them into an AI as prompts.
We then used the generated images to create the adverts. We came up with the text, font, colours and layout ourselves.