Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse at the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein

Human society’s fascination with leaving behind the limitations and fragilities and vagaries of the human being, and of the planet we all call home, is almost as old as human society, and is inextricably linked with developments in technology, science, engineering and human society’s understandings of itself and its environments; amongst the earliest descriptions, for example, of flying to the moon being Francis Godwin’s 1638 book The Man in the Moone, an account of a journey, and of the beings who call the moone home, published just 28 years after Galileo Galilei published the first detailed sketches of the surface of the moon. As soon as we ‘knew’ about the moon in ‘detail’, we wanted to be there. And wanted to get to know the natives. Whom we assumed existed.

And a fascination that, for want of a better phrase, took off, as space travel became a reality in the second half of the 20th century, and that at a time when there was an active desire to rebuild global human society after the trials, tribulations and Wars of the first half of the 20th century, a very real desire to leave behind the most recent chapter in human (hi)story and to write a new one. Ideally in a place far, far away from recent memory. And a desire to establish that new human society with the aid of that newest of human species: the designer. A species who had evolved from a synthesis of architects and artists and artisans in the course of the first third of the 20th century with the promise of providing for all.

With the actual moon landing on July 20th 1969, just 331 years after that first moone landing, anything and everything became possible. Science fiction was becoming science reality.

With Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein explore science fiction and design, science fiction as design, design as science fiction, and in doing so invite you to re-imagine, re-construct, re-frame familiar narratives…….