Smithsonian FUTURES Presents: Your Future Guide

As part of the Smithsonian Museum’s new FUTURES exhibition, we were asked to create an idea that uses the exhibition to turn an overwhelming global sense of helplessness into one of optimism.

To care for a future, one must first see themselves in it.

More than 90% of people struggle to imagine themselves in the medium future (think, 2050), so to begin, our idea had to solve for this issue. Enter, Your Future Guide.

We combined machine learning, AI, and voice recognition technologies with personality research and hundreds of scripts (with all their variations), to create a tour of the FUTURES exhibition, guided by yourself from the year 2050.

Users provided voice samples, a photo, and some multi-choice answers to meet their future self for the first time. And with the information we had, each tour was curated to show the objects most relevant to each visitor.

And it turns out the idea worked: Of the 625,000 people who visited, 83% said they were able to imagine a better future, and 80% said they were inspired to take direct and concrete action to build the future they want to live in.

The video below gives more detail on the back end, and even further down are some kind words FastCompany had to say about the project (suffice to say, it’s easily the most ambitious one I’ve been part of).