Writing exercise: items of the future

Warm up: Future of items

Look around you and choose a few objects. These can be natural or man-made, but preferably a mix of both. Write a few sentences about whether you think these things have a future. Will they still be here in 100 years? What will happen to the actual object over a period of time? If it’s man made, will we still be making it? Perhaps imagine a world in which we don’t.

Brainstorm: Carrying our physical world into the future

“All cities are incipient ruins… the ruin is there already, beneath the shining street.” David Farrier, Footprints

Draw a line down along a sheet of paper in the form of a timeline. Write the word small at one end, and large at the other.

Populate the lines with things that won’t disappear quickly, that will live on into the future. Order them by size; a plastic bead might end up at one end, and a building or a tanker ship at the other end.

Think about objects we currently use and rely on but will leave behind as a future fossils: roads, space junk, buildings. How will these future fossils be discovered, and what will they say about us?

Start writing

• Choose an object you’d like to survive into the future and write about why you think it should survive.
• Choose an object you wouldn’t like to survive into the future and write about why you don’t want people to find it.
• Imagine touching a fossil – something that is hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years old. What does that object tell us about our current time, now, as a kind of future?
• If you could gift three objects of your own to a loved one or a friend to keep for the future, what would they be? Write a paragraph for each object.
• Describe an object someone has gifted you (a piece of jewellery, for example) that you’ve carried with you into the future. Write about what it means to you.