Ideation and Prototyping: Time Capsule Part 3
The updated blog is here! https://medium.com/@bc3099/ideation-and-prototyping-time-capsule-part-3-revised-extended-3fe24cbfd573
This week in Ideation and Prototyping, we were assigned to create a 2-page comic depicting a scenario that might occur in the year 2145, after our time capsules have been discovered by future beings.
My initial thought was about how the majority of my objects are more functional than nostalgic, and about how technology becomes obsolete extremely quickly. I thought about the concept of planned obsolescence, where companies intentionally create products that malfunction after a short lifecycle to keep consumers buying new products, and then I thought about immense innovation, making older methods of approaching a problem obsolete.
When thinking about what might be obsolete in 125 years, I remembered the idea of taking it backwards thanks to a sketch on Ellen DeGeneres’ show where she challenges young adults to use currently outdated technology. You can see the skit I’m referring to here:
Although the skit raised controversy about intentionally making the guest seem incapable to please the average viewer base, I still found the concept of showing intellectually capable people old technology, and guessing what its use was. She makes comments about encyclopedias and rotary phones, nut what really sparked my idea for my comic was the interaction at around 2 minutes into the video. Ellen asks the contestant if she knows what the function of three pieces of technology were, and although the contestant got them all right, I have a feeling that people 5 times further removed from the technologies they’re referring to would have a harder time guessing.
I started to jot down some ideas as to how the 7 items in my time capsule could be misinterpreted far into the future, and thought about which would be easiest to include in a game show where the contestants had to guess the purpose of said items.
I envisioned the series having two contestants on a stage in front of a live audience with a host and a hazmat-suited scavenger (Geo) that would unveil relics from the past live on stream. The contestants (Daxter and Felicia) would buzz in with their (generally incorrect) guesses, and the host would explain the confusion and describe the actual purpose for the items.
I liked the idea of the host and contestants all being relatively anonymous, as they are not the point of the story — they could be anyone from the time period, so they are never the center-point of the frame after the scene is established. This decision also lead me to include things like the host’s face’s silhouette melding into the side of several frames, conveying who was talking without drawing attention away from the objects or scenario. The only live moments of movement were when the contestants tried to smack the button on their turn, and to emphasize their instantaneity, I kept those out of frames. I hoped that this made it even more clear at the very end, when both contestants whack the button at the same time. The scene with Geo opening digging into the Cajon and tossing items all over the place has feelings of movement and power, which is why I let them bleed out of frame. The only other scene that was out of the standard framing was the one panning over the audience, where the purpose was to show that the audience grew extensively on either side to show that guessing the purpose of outdated technology was an interesting/ popular pass time for people in the future.
I’ve added a note below the comic to explain some of the discrepancies without spoiling while you read.
I called the gameshow “Arcane Artifacts”, and you can read it here!
I also wanted to note that I envisioned this comic being read either in the time period in the future or in the context of a reader who’s already understood some of the universe.
For example, I reference the “birdrone” twice, which is a bird-shaped drone that delivers packages and opens them for the users, depicted on the bottom of the first page. The item was a Chef’s Knife, which the host compares to laser chefs that “cut and cook your meal faster than you can make it to the table”!
I also envisioned some sort of intense censorship around shrines or statues of figures from the past, and originally had the idea of showing the mannequin head and having the host comment about how “this head must represent a historic founder of the past, like our god — Mr. Bezos!” with the frame panning over to a shrine to a post-Amazon-consumed universe. I decided against that though, as I wanted to bring some odd ambiguity rather than pure distopian feelings to the reader. Instead, I have the host freak out about showing a shrine live on stream that they claimed had been “Medusa’d”, cutting to the old T.V. static color bars visual, and the host coming back with a new item as if nothing had happened.
Next were my Jaybird Vista headphones, that I cartoonified to look a little more like Airpods, or Elbow-shaped pasta. One contestant guesses that they were “Hydrogen Chromatographers”, or devices that separated the hydrogen from oxygen, and compared them to the futuristic snorkeling device they wear to breathe underwater. The other contestant guesses that it’s a 2-bite snack pack, where the devices expand into full meals upon consumption. The host then declares that they were once again wrong, and the device was actually headphones, which were used to listen to music before audio could be streamed directly to the brain!
The irony of the whole story is that this dystopian future exists where people don’t know the purpose of headphones, a mannequin head, or even a chef’s knife, and yet Heelys have maintained, or potentially even re-worked their way into the zeitgeist of the time, and both contestants knew exactly what they were instantly!
