Souvenirs From The Futures Exhibition Catalog, 2018
Newsprint, 64 pages
11.38 x 14.96 inches

The Souvenirs from the Future exhibition catalog and exhibition is a 64-page newspaper that features speculative design projects created by industrial design students from Cuba, India, Iran, Peru, and Ethiopia. The piece includes original text by students in Spanish, Amharic, Persian, English, and Devanagari set in Noto, Univers, and Charter. The stories and project descriptions are set in their native languages and have hierarchical prominence in the layout. The type is a larger size, while the English text is smaller and deprioritized. This design gesture was intended to elevate Non-Western perspectives of the future. The newspaper is multifunctional. Each page doubles as a poster and an exhibition label to allow each recipient to recreate the exhibition in a variety of countries. The disposable newspaper format also represents a future that is continually changing. This piece is today’s news of the future; tomorrow will have a different story. The Global Futures Lab is a series of workshops created by RISD professor, Paolo Cardini. These collaborative efforts between students, faculty and artisans in Iran, India, Cuba, Peru, and Ethiopia have now yielded a nuanced and thought-provoking collection of work Cardini calls “Souvenirs From The Futures”—objects that suggest a vision of a world to come not often represented by the predominantly Western frame of speculative design.