Core-fave Extrapolation Factory has teamed up with The Situation Lab to produce their latest caper; 1-888-FUTURES is a new telephone-based delivery service which allows anyone in the US to request a gift from the future, created to order and shipped to their chosen recipient.

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The service is a playful research endeavor aimed at tapping collective creativity and experimenting with new techniques for crowdsourcing visions of future scenarios. It is part of the ‘Futurematic’ series run by The Extrapolation Factory and Situation Lab, two groups both focused on exploring design-driven strategies to bring alternative futures to life. 1-888-FUTURES will be hosted by the Visions and Voices initiative at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, culminating on September 20th.

Once a request is registered at 1-888-FUTURES, workshop participants at USC will interpret the recordings and fabricate artifacts that respond to the visions. When the artifact is complete, it will be boxed up and sent to the addressee of the caller’s choice—not to be opened until the visioner’s chosen date.

You can send a “future present” to someone by calling 1-888-FUTURES before September 20th. Just be sure you have a future dream in mind, together with a specific individual recipient and current delivery address. “If you need some time to prepare these, please hang up and call back later.”  More information can be found at www.donotopenbefo.re

(Photo: Bernard Pollack, CC2.0)