“Give [your phone] a SECOND! IT’S GOING TO SPACE!” Louis CK
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C Clarke
Future magic is an idea we talk a lot about – amongst ourselves more than anything so far. We wanted a couple of months to kick it around, see if it works for us as a new set of people with a new set of aims. Or if it just sounded nice. I think it was Russell Davies who wrote something once (that I can’t find) about the way Nike “socialise” ideas internally to see whether and how they stick; what their potential is to make things happen, in brains and hands and pixels.
Anyway, it seems to be making some very good things happen, which we’d like to share. And I wanted to explain it a bit more first.
As an ethos or aim, making future magic is the output of the 10 Spartan Rules properly practised: it’s our priority, using these, to bring future magic into the world. We see the agency’s job as making communications, products and services with the kind of magical effect technology on its own once had, at a time of prevailing – and euphemistic – gluttony for the “timely, relevant, useful, rational” (or spam, as most people know it).
So what do we mean by making future magic? For us it’s a massive, fertile area, in its simplest form broken down into three:
making Collaboration, an understanding of materials, and craftsmanship.
future New. Not necessarily hi-tech or sci-fi; just something that’s not been seen before. This goes for business models as well as creative work.
magic Playful, surprising, unexpected; with a positive cultural impact.
There’s something utopian about the aims behind future magic, but it’s also commercially focused. For us, communications, products and services at their best – most valuable and most competitive – are magical.
Mameshiba, Miniature Prices, Melody Road, Ichida Garden Newspaper and iButterfly are examples.
Future Magic is an idea we hope inspires other people as well as us – a big implication, and a way of us measuring its success is that it’s socially minded, and generous. We’d never claim to have a veto on future magic – we’ve just begun, and besides there are lots of people out there who’ve been doing it a long time, not least our Dentsu colleagues in Japan.
We want to find like minds interested in doing similar, and we know we’ll need to to make it work.
Which brings me onto our first collaborations. As future magic is a constantly morphing idea, in permanent beta, we thought it would be nice if every time you saw Making Future Magic! it was new. We’ve been working with some brilliant up-and-coming designers, illustrators and typographers to explore the idea.
So far 10 different artists have created their own interpretations, for the beginning of an ongoing series. We’re making all sorts of things out of these: giant artworks in the spaceship, t-shirts, stickers, badges and other merch which we’re looking into making available online. I’ll be using the next few posts to feature some of the original works.
In the meantime, a huge thanks to our awesome future magic co-conspirators to date: