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We very quickly got stuck in a kind of quicksand about whether and why we were promoting a questionable form of lo-brow and generally crap consumerism. Were we simply doing a classic client-services design exercise or were we trying to perform a political act? Personally I didn’t have a problem with the SkyMall trope because I took it to mean as Julian Bleecker, the workshop’s organizer, said those technologies and processes that used to be considered magic but that have become so cheap and so readily available that they make possible something like Sky Mall to exist.

So the exercise was to think about what a future SkyMall might look like from today’s eyes; to think about the kinds of things that might have plausible manufacturability in the next five years or so.

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- by Aaron Straup Cope.