Imagine the near future where BCI are omnipresent. How would human interactions evolve? What will we make redundant and what will we create?

At the beginning of the summer term of 2019 we met with students of the first year of MA Material Futures at Central Saint Martins in London.

Soon they were to be given a new project brief, focusing on nanotechnologies and their possibilities. To brainstorm ideas, SNQ run a workshop focusing on a quite extreme scenario of applied nanotechnology - Brain Computer Interfaces.

We asked the participants to imagine a future where BCI’s are omnipresent, everybody has access to them, nobody’s surprised anymore.

How would human interactions evolve, we asked? How would it influence the way we communicate with each other and the way we approach services and products? What would stop having a right to exist?

We started with a very basic overview of the main points in history that dramatically changed our communication. From the development of language up until the first time you dialled into the internet, milestone inventions changed the way we live. Soon there will be a new revolution, that has already slowly started to happen.

We discussed how, already today, we’re augmenting our bodies and our senses to see and feel more, to intensify or add completely new elements to our everyday perception.
We went through microchips that help you open doors and pay for coffee with a swipe of a hand, people who can feel the magnetic North or Moonquakes, speculations on the new gestural alphabet developed to aid our devices and plain old smartphones, that extend our cognition beyond ever imaginable boundaries.

And then we asked, if this is already happening now, what will happen soon? How are these trends going to progress and what are we hoping they’ll do to our everyday? What do we fear?

The result is “conn3cted”, a collection of objects and services from the future where we’re all wired (or maybe rather: wireless). Check it out!

picture credit: Biohax, Neil Harbisson, Apple, Moon Ribas, Near Future Laboratory, Cyborg Nest