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Design

New Project Predicts The Technological Symbols And Icons Of The Future

Drone Surveillance icons? Check. 3D Food Printing? Check.

A couple months ago, FastCoExist shared a project by Berlin-based interdisciplinary lab Hypermorgen, that was inspired after it tried to find an email icon that would signify an encrypted message. Nothing like it existed yet, so the team made their own, leading to the group making other symbols that could become omnipresent in the near future. Interactive advertising veteran and digital creative director, Fernando Barbella, had been thinking similarly, and began making his own icons for concepts such as drone surveillance, meat-printing, and smart eye lenses, before putting all these new symbols on a Tumblr called Signs From The Near Future.

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We got in touch with Barbella, who explained that his project strives "to expose a point of view, and to make visitors think about how far and how fast we want to go in this technological race." He kept reading news reports about innovations in autonomous driving, nano-medicine, 3D food printers, and improved capabilities for formerly "dumb" or inanimate things. The potential to anticipate future developments to help make better decisions today was too interesting to shy away from, and so Barbella, like Hypermorgen, began making his own signs—handling the copy, art direction, and digital retouching himself.

We asked Barbella which of the icons he's designed does he expect to become commonplace first. "We really can't figure out what's going to happen in the near future, since the rate at which these cultural changes are taking place is huge," he replied. "But I can imagine the symbols related to self-driving cars, food-printing, and encrypted email are closer to becoming a real thing."

Barbella noted that a huge range of icons we use on a daily basis that belong to operating systems and programs are outdated, such as the floppy disk icon for saving files, the voicemail icon that evokes reel-to-reel tape, or the handset icon which "new generations never touched ever." The designer has a few other images in the works, potentially including a Hyperloop or super-fast transportation image, as well as more smart glasses iconography. But he also stated he doesn't want to stress the concept. "The very moment I feel I'm forcing the consistency of the collection or distorting the message, I'll stop doing it."

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Regardless if Barbella or Hypermorgen are semiotic soothsayers, they're certainly on to something: it's only a matter of time until our bathrooms have signs that prohibit smart lenses, or restaurants that have anti-vaping icons. These projects are certainly on to something.

Above symbols via Hypermorgen

Visit Fernando Barbello's site for more.

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@zachsokol