?Optimism is the only way forward?: the exhibition that imagines our future

If America has stood for anything, it's surely forward-looking optimism. In New York, Chicago, Detroit and other shining cities, its soaring skyscrapers pointed to the future. But has the bubble burst in the 21st century?

"We don't see ourselves striding toward a better tomorrow," columnist Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times last month, citing research that found 71% of Americans believe that this country is on the wrong track. "We see ourselves tiptoeing around catastrophe. That was true even before Covid. That was true even before Trump."

This disquiet hovers over Futures, a new exhibition that marks the reopening of the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building after nearly two decades lying moribund on Washington's National Mall.

Spanning 32,000 sq feet, the show offers a sobering reminder from the past that utopian predictions of the future usually turn out to be wrong. It warns about the danger of unintended consequences: today's wonder invention is tomorrow's arch polluter. And then it has a dilemma familiar to journalists who report on the climate crisis: how to walk the line between alarm and fatalism.

"It's a needle we tried to thread throughout the whole exhibition," says Rachel Goslins, director of the Arts and Industries Building. "How do we be hopeful without being naive and how do we surface challenges without creating more anxiety?

"Everybody wanted to be part of this exhibition because there's a real hunger on the part of artists, designers and scientists to be part of a narrative that allows people to imagine the future they want and not the future they fear. To be part of an exhibition that came from a place of hopefulness about the future was attractive."

The display includes innovations in protein production, a "bioreactor" that uses algae to capture carbon from the air with 400 times the efficiency of a tree, an alternative to a coffin in the form of a biodegradable capsule that enables a decomposing body to nourish a tree, and coin-operated washing machines hooked up to grow a garden of wetland plants - "an ecosystem on rinse cycle".