Remember The Future?

A few weeks ago, I came across a stash of slides of my student work that I had always intended to transfer to digital storage before their emulsion deteriorated and I lost them forever.  Since starting an archiving project didn’t seem like a particularly fun way to spend my weekend when I last had them out, I stuffed them back in their box and let them sit on a closet shelf for a couple (or five) more years instead.

Unfortunately, during that last stretch of neglect, some unofficial expiry date passed and they literally, and almost comically, devolved to the final stages of a complete film meltdown.  This time around, I would either have to transfer them immediately to my computer or take a final look and toss them in the trash.  I decided to give preservation a try.

Luckily for me, there were enough duplicates of each slide that I was able to scrape together a good representation of the work and send them through the scanner before exposure to light and air did them in completely.  I felt a bit like Howard Carter must have while handling Tutankhamun’s knickknacks, but these artifacts were neither particularly earth shattering or especially old.  In the end, I was able to scan about seventy-five slides, or what amounted to a quarter of the portfolio.

Sentimentality is not my thing.  The slides didn’t self-destruct, after all, because they were over-handled mementos of halcyon college days.  If I had no use for them, they’d be long gone by now.  I think, instead, that there might be a good way to repurpose this collection of ideas, and those of others, that were rendered useless as soon as they were replaced with real-world examples.

Student work is naïve and unprofessional in the sense that it reflects creative growth and academic aptitude over actual experience.  At the same time it is also, at its best, unbridled, fantastical and possibly just far enough from crazy to inspire someone with the know-how or gumption to put it to practical use.

I can only imagine that there are millions of design concepts out there that were conceived over ramen noodles and beer at 3:00 a.m., but that are now only a distant memory.  Rather than being left to ferment into a pile of toxic goo on a shelf, or succumb to some yet unknown digital fate, they might better be put to use by inventors, writers, designers or directors in search of a seed of something new.

As a student, I thought a lot about what innovations the future would bring to transportation, home and appliance design.  I don’t know what I was specifically focusing on with most of my salvaged sketches, but they make me realize that I had a lot of hope and confidence that almost anything might be possible in the years to come.  And, true to prediction – with a little help from Hollywood at least – it now is.

For the time being, the drawings are safely stored on a DVD.  When that goes the way of the slides, I like to think that the work will live on and continue to be accessible to me, in some form. When I need to remember the future as I saw it, I don’t want to have to complete an excavation and restoration project first.

And so, in the spirit of sharing useless ideas for a common good, I have included my drawings of organic, joystick style steering mechanisms, helmets and consoles with this post, all of which were devised to be used in amphibious vehicles – in case that isn’t obvious.  The vehicle itself?  Sadly, those drawings didn’t fare so well.

© Markus Horak, 2011

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