Connected futures

This digital artwork by Abhishek Choudhury depicted a futuristic magazine advertisement for U-Phone, a concept device that eliminated the need for traditional smartphones by integrating communication technology directly into the human body. In this imagined future, users made calls by raising their palms or swiped right in the air to interact—without carrying a physical device. The user, in essence, became the phone.

The artwork is part of an innovative exhibition called 'Visions of the Future'. It is presented under Futurescape, a project from the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, in collaboration with scholars from the Forecasting Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Through a longitudinal forecasting tournament, researchers explored possible visions for human welfare and societal change, drawing on the insights of experts, superforecasters, and everyday people across four key domains: Climate, Economy, Peace/ War, and Public Health.

Abhishek's artwork was inspired by the advertisements and graphics of mid-20th-century magazines and the current wave of technological change—particularly the development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Drawing from insights shared by forecasters, he imagined how future scenarios might appear in the pages of a magazine from tomorrow.

Disclaimer: The artwork presented here is a speculative visualisation generated using AI. It is based on current insights and expert forecasts, but it represents imagined possibilities rather than definitive predictions of the future. The story and locations mentioned in it should be understood as creative interpretations rather than factual representations of real-world scenarios.