2025 — Concept & Interaction Design · Futurity Systems

Futures Garden

An EU initiative exploring life in 2040 through conversations with digital souls: LLM-powered archetypes accessed via a physical Orb with NFC-enabled phygital objects.

The brief

Futures Garden is an EU initiative about making 2040 discussable. Instead of another foresight report, the idea was an immersive exhibit: you meet the future by talking to characters who already live there, digital souls with their own voices and points of view.

This was a team project at Futurity Systems. My part was the concept stage; the build belongs to my colleagues.

Objects as the interface

I worked on the shape of the exhibit as a whole and on the thread that ended up defining it: physical artefacts from the future as the interface. Early versions were wearable, backpacks and NFC-tagged objects that talked to your phone. The idea that survived every iteration was the tap: touch a future object and it starts a conversation. No screen, no menu, the tap carries all the meaning a UI would normally spell out.

The Orb

The piece that resolved the concept came from a teammate: one physical Orb as the voice of the exhibit. The digital souls are LLM-powered archetypes speaking through voice agents built on ElevenLabs, and the NFC-tagged artefacts act as conversation keys. Tap an artefact on the Orb and its soul speaks.

By the time the build started I had moved almost fully onto FAST, so the Orb hardware, the voice-agent implementation, and the final exhibit are the team’s work. The concept of talking to the future through its objects is the part I can honestly claim a share of.

What it settled

Phygital interfaces live or die on how much meaning one physical gesture can carry. Getting the artefact-tap to feel like addressing a person, not scanning a barcode, was the whole design problem, and it was solved in the concept, before any hardware existed. That lesson, that the interaction model is the product, is the same one that runs through my software work.