Quezi

"Correspondence cinema", a concept from 1910 (PD-EXP)

When a company wants to capture the most creative, optimistic ideas about what it might produce in the future, it produces a concept video.

There are no pesky constraints caused by technological limitations. The producers are free to include anything they can imagine in the video. It’s a glance into a future that might be.

Then, the designers step back into reality and see if they can move in that design direction with a real, practically achievable product.

Many years later, we can watch the concept video again and have a good old laugh. Sometimes that’s because, even in their wildest imagination, the producers of the concept video couldn’t imagine what was to become possible in the future. But sometimes it’s because the concept is as unachieveable as ever but now even the idea seems ridiculous.

Apple Computer produced this Knowledge Navigator concept video back in 1987. It’s very nicely made, and foresees a world where our tablet computer helps us in every aspect of our daily lives. I guess they forgot about spam, viruses and popups.

Here are two current concept videos, showing what phones of the future could be like if freed of technological constraints. There’s the Nokia 888 concept phone and the Nokia Morph Nanoscale Phone.

Microsoft has produced this fabulous look towards the future of computing. It’s very imaginative if somewhat utopian. Some really creative minds were behind that!