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Part II. Instruments
Chapter 7. Nostalgia as a style
Annie Atkins advises everyone who makes prop designs for historical settings to look for an inspiration offline, simply to visit a flea market or an antique shop to find your own historically accurate reference-gems. But what should people do, who design for the far future, if there are no references of it yet? Design that we usually call futuristic is, of course, not a design directly from the future. It is an attempt of a designer, writer, or any other creative to predict how the future will look like. A fully accurate prediction is almost impossible: even if the idea of some technology had been imagined correctly, the shape of it was often pictured whimsical and ridiculous compared to the future we actually got. This phenomenon was named retro-futurism. It is not believable at all, but funny and apparently old-fashioned.
En L’An 2000 [In the Year 2000]. French retrofuturistic image series by artists including JeanMarc Côté.
И мы будем на Луне [And we will be on the Moon]. Moon base in USSR magazine Technology of youth, 1964.
The goal of every designer in design fiction is to create a relatable image of the future. But achieving a truly futuristic look is tricky due to narrow bor-
