What will tomorrow be like?

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I first tried Apple’s Vision Pro glasses in May. It was a surreal experience at the company’s Battersea headquarters, where I found myself attacking 3D dinosaurs and dismantling Ferraris using small gestures to look at engine parts. It was all designed to demonstrate the limitless possibilities of augmented reality: an immersive world of giant cinematic screens where you could click and swipe through text messages, apps and emails, all the while looking like a traffic controller with a giant screen. tied to my face. .

If this was the future, it made me dizzy. Vision Pro has been designed to optimize our visual experiences, but its launch coincided with a period of caution about our reliance on screens and how best to live with phones. Many establishments are now banning smartphones during school hours and there is compelling evidence to suggest that our screen use is contributing to mental illness, lack of sleep and overall poor health.

Rhodri Marsden, an early adopter of techno, has analyzed the future of the screen in this week’s design editionand how its pervasive influence could change in the coming years. I still can’t imagine a day when we routinely wear screens on our faces, but then again, who would have known we’d all be carrying palm-sized computers in our pockets when smartphones were first released 20 years ago? years?

Design has always looked to the future, but it’s a strange irony that its most innovative efforts can seem quaint in retrospect. Perhaps the trick is not to think about what’s next, but to focus on what seems relevant right now. Jumbo in New York has built a practice based on taking objects and reducing them to their essence until they make “emoji” sense. Her work—fortune cookie furniture, pasta pool floats, and barricade chairs—is inspired by everyday things that have been reimagined as “memes.” It’s contemporary, clever, and conversation-starting, despite their insistence that what they’re doing is “dumb.” It also contributes to a Design narrative that I think will make sense for many years to come..

The trick is not to think about what’s next, but what seems relevant right now.

Revered by the design world, the work of the late architect Carlo Scarpa synthesized ancient craft techniques with the demands of industrial design. Its buildings are a striking expression of something unwaveringly modern but rooted in a family history. When businessman and art collector Josef Dalle Nogare purchased Casa Tabarelli, Scarpa’s mountain masterpiece near Bolzano, Italy, he did so with the understanding that he was simply its custodian. However, in later years, he made his own addition to the property: a two-story structure with concrete stairs designed by Walter Angonese that yields a 5,000-square-foot partially underground gallery to house his art next door. The result is a surprising confluence of aesthetics and artistic choices. It takes a brave soul to build something so close to the Scarpa house: We’re very excited to get our first look inside..

Will you go to space soon? As Jeff Bezos and his cohort inch closer to their orbital ambitions, we look at the direction of space travel and future possibilities. According to Clive Cookson, the FOOTVirgin Galactic, senior science writer, will offer 125 flights a year, carrying about 750 passengers into suborbital space. As with the use of the face shield, I have never harbored much desire to be an astronaut. But I will gladly sit and watch your phone snapshots of the “overview effect” when you return to Earth.

We also welcome here another FOOT writer, the weekend magazine editor Matt Vella, who debuts a new motoring column. Matt has been a car fan since childhood, so we’ve asked him to do a regular feature on all things four wheels. “Stout and snub-nosed, with a vertical front window and four-wheel drive,” he writes of his first model, the Willys-Overland Jeep, which was conceived as a compact all-terrain vehicle in 1940. Its subsequent success is due to the fact that it has retained its distinctive look, its “two-box silhouette” and, most importantly, its compact size. The shape has become a leader in a global market that is expected to grow to $590 billion by 2034. Small is beautiful, it is argued. Especially when it comes to SUVs.

Finally: do you have a Casio watch? Beatriz Hodgkin, the FOOTThe House and Home editor has been using her hot pink Casio F-91W for years and is passionate about its charms. The brand has become a cult classic, as seen by Marty McFly, Barack Obama and Sigourney Weaver in Foreign. On its 50th anniversary, she writes a tribute to the “future classic” – surely the hallmark of cool design.

@jellison22