1-888-FUTURES, 2015

1-888-FUTURES was a temporary hotline that turned callers’ descriptions of possible futures into gifts for named recipients. Callers left a dream, concern or vision; participating university students developed it into a physical “future present” and mailed it to the chosen person. Hosted at USC in 2015 with Situation Lab and Jen Stein, the project explored speculative design as a personal exchange, connecting the person imagining a future, the person making its artifact and an audience of one.

Archive: The hotline closed on September 19, 2015.

See more documentation on Flickr.

Research interests
Participatory futures · Prototyping

Project credits

A project by: Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery
In collaboration with: Situation Lab (Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson) and Jen Stein, USC School of Cinematic Arts

Host: University of Southern California, Visions and Voices

Future visions and requests: Public callers
Artifact development: Participating university students

1‑888‑FUTURES pull‑tab street poster, inviting callers to describe future visions that workshop participants translated into artifacts mailed to chosen recipients.

Original 2015 event context

This is the third “Futurematic” design jam jointly run by Situation Lab (Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson) with New York-based design collective The Extrapolation Factory (Elliott Montgomery and Chris Woebken). Graciously hosting on this occasion is the University of Southern California’s Visions and Voices series, with the priceless collaboration of Professor Jen Stein from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

Futurematic events riff playfully on commercial and industrial making processes, while focusing on the very non-industrial, not-yet-massified design space of imaginary objects. At the first event, participants filled up a vending machine with future artifacts in a day last spring at OCAD U. For the second, last summer at NYU, people created and put future street merchandise on sale at Canal St and Broadway in Manhattan. Both used The Thing From The Future as the creative engine. This time, the ideation engine is the public’s imagination itself. With that as the driving force, workshop participants will send out as many “future presents” made to order as we can, from our temporary 1-888-FUTURES fulfilment center in Los Angeles to all over the country.

Participation was free. Callers could participate from anywhere, with delivery to addresses in the U.S.

The lines were open 24/7 until midnight on Saturday, September 19th 2015.