Our images depict articles from a speculative newspaper and StinkPunk flier.

You can read the full content of these publications here. 

“News from the future” shares artefacts from a future where olfactory technologies are ubiquitous. A newspaper houses articles and advertisements that serve as speculative design fictions to imagine the technologies’ influence through themes like local gossip, business and the environment. A revolutionist movement called “StinkPunk” has slipped a flier into the newspaper, calling for a mass movement to confuse olfactory technologies due to perceived injustices. StinkPunk’s call to arms offers a counter narrative to the events in the paper giving readers different viewpoints from the institutions presented in, and by, the newspaper. 

The goal of our piece was to create playful vignettes of a future world to provoke discussion amongst conference attendees. We imagined both positive and negative use scenarios and tried to empathise and critically explore what life might look like for the people involved. The devices we chose (newspaper sections/articles, advertisements, and a flier), helped us work quickly, focusing our imagination on a range of different sectors/scenarios but also let us collate a wide a range of ideas from individual and group brainstorming into a single complex world. 

We generated our own insights through this process, and we hope that the piece sparks critical thoughts and conversations.