What will the future look like?

I had to politely refuse the honey caterpillar and cucumber sandwich seasoned with crickets. “I’m a vegetarian,” I explained regretfully—and truthfully, though I noticed there was suddenly an unusually high proportion of vegetarians in the room. Sadly my excuse didn’t hold when the shredded turnip fermented in whey was passed around. “Doesn’t it have meat in?” I asked hopefully. The person next to me shook his head. I took a tentative lick. “Mmm,” I said, unconvincingly. “This will be much more common in the future,” the chef explained. By preserving food, fermentation helps reduce waste, and apparently the bacteria it produces can be good for you. “Wonderful,” I grimaced, as I was handed a tub of elderberries possibly gathered from the side of a train track.

This was FutureFest, a two-day festival held over the weekend in Shoreditch to explore ideas about what life might be like in the future. In the Gastrodome I tried flowers, fermented foods, and a delicious grape infused with blackberry. Charles Spence of Oxford University explained how the restaurants of the future will use sound, touch and visuals to enhance flavours. It’s incredible how just the sound of cooking can get you licking your lips, for example. The House of Wolf restaurant in Islington has been experimenting with playing different sounds to diners to change the flavour of their food—some sounds can make food taste sweeter, and others more bitter.

Andoni Luis Aduriz—of El Bulli fame—explained how the haute cuisine concepts of originality, sensory stimulation and ambience were first developed by Marinetti with his “Futurist cooking” in the 1930s. Amazingly, these are the ideas that still hold sway today. Aduriz showed us newspaper articles from the 1920s which imagined meals of the future reduced to mere pills. A 1926 cartoon from the “Ogden Standard-Examiner” showed a futuristic boss shouting at an employee for taking as long as four minutes to eat lunch.

Aduriz talked about how food has become healthier, a trend that will continue. “When I started cooking school, they used to say that the doctor’s work is to save people’s health and the chef’s work is to ruin it. That has obviously changed now.” He imagined us eating insects and meat grown in laboratories in the future (start-up food company Ento was on hand to offer us insect-based delights). “What will the future look like?” he asked. “Nine billion people, living mostly in cities… We will go back to the Renaissance,” he predicted. “Cities will become states.”

Handlebar-moustachioed journalist Ben Hammersley was also envisaging us redefining our borders. “European borders are historical accidents,” he pointed out. So what if you redrew the map according to more tangible shared traits, like the kind of people we are and the kind of things we like? (This reminds me of a test I took online last week, which identifies your “internal citizenship” according to your beliefs and preferences—apparently I’m Swedish. I’m not quite sure what this says about me—I’ve never been to Sweden—but looking at the answers I gave I can only assume that the Swedes are protest-loving atheists who believe in the importance of leisure time.) We have access to more data than ever before and if we looked at all that information, we might find that London has more shared identity with Paris or Copenhagen than it does with Wales or Cornwall. The nations we see on our current maps are “groupings created through historical accident and not through a genuine understanding of allegiance,” he said.

Meanwhile Alex Fleetwood, Director of game design studio Hide&Seek, predicted that we would one day have a National Game Space, just as we have a National Gallery. “Game culture will move alongside the other spaces that make up our civic life… Going out to play will be as common an activity as going out to eat,” he said. Alice Taylor, founder of MakieLab, which allows children to make personalised dolls using 3D printers, told us about the innovations being made through the increasing accessibility of these printers, which should cost as little as £500 in a few years’ time.

On Sunday morning, Roberto Unger, the political philosopher and professor at Harvard Law School, gave us a sermon about “the need for a religious revolution… Under our current system there is no sufficient basis for social solidarity,” he said. “New prophets will arrive to deliver a new message in a new voice.” But for Astronomer Royal Martin Rees envisaging humanity in the future was not enough—he suggested that the post-human era could begin in a few hundred years’ time and described the aftermath of a huge collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way.

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A little while later I found myself sitting on a chair in a bare, windowless room in a basement. I had a large pair of headphones on. A man stood disinterestedly beside me typing something into an iPad. A voice came over the headphones. “Jessica, stand up and walk through the curtains.” I followed the instructions, pushing aside a pair of heavy black curtains to enter a large, dark room with a flowchart marked out on the floor. I stood in the first box. “The power to fly or an invisibility cloak?” the voice asked me. “The power to fly,” I answered, and was directed towards the left. “Hope or belief?” said the voice. I wasn’t so sure about this one. “Hope?” I suggested. I was sent to the right. The questions kept coming until I had reached the end of the flow chart, and was standing in a box marked “Six”. I was taken into another room—a small interrogation room with two chairs, a video camera and a blindingly bright light. I sat in one chair; my interrogator in the other. “You were very sure about the power to fly,” she said. “Why?” I blinked in the bright light, babbling away as I tried to justify my answers in front of the camera.

This art project by non zero one uses technology—headphones and cameras—to put the audience at the centre of the experience; the viewer becomes the viewed. The questions do not have any particular significance and can be interpreted in multiple ways, but the viewer is held to account for their decisions afterwards and must explain their thinking. The videos are posted to a secure website afterwards and can be viewed by anyone who shares your number—six, in my case. I was also given a badge with the number six printed on it and encouraged to speak to any fellow sixes I happened to bump into later on. It puts you on the spot, being asked why you interpreted an ambiguous question in a particular way, and you’re suddenly made aware of a network of background assumptions that led you to your answer—an enlightening experience; almost like therapy, except it’s then posted on the internet.

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It struck me that two main themes emerged from FutureFest. On the one hand, speakers imagined that, in the future, technology would allow us greater individuality—art projects centred around the viewer, customised toys, and nationalities based on our preferences and personalities. On the other hand, there was a concern with enhancing the shared experience—a religious revolution to encourage social solidarity, a National Game Space where we can play together, borders redrawn so that we have more in common with our fellow countrymen and talking to strangers who shared my "Number 6" badge. If the tension between the individual and shared experience is defining our visions of the future, that tells us something about the challenges we’re facing today.

FutureFest was organised by Nesta, the “innovation foundation”—you’ll be able to watch the talks on their website later this week, or look to #FutureFest for more.