postcard from the future
[“generative ai”-module | fall 2025]
this speculative postcard imagines a radically transformed berlin in 2035, where the city’s famously cold, all-black and techno-coded detachment dissolves into a hyper-saturated, barbie-core hedonistic renaissance. instead of the usual dystopian narratives tied to ai replacement, late capitalist burnout, and decline of humaneness, this work flips the script: what if emerging technologies actually amplified collective joy, beauty, intimacy, and daily excitement?
bodies are sculpted, moods uplifted, relationships easeful, and personal robots stroll beside their human partners as lifestyle extensions. here, the “instagram fantasy” finally becomes the lived city — not a filter, but a shared urban aesthetic.
on a deeper level, the project plays with a generational hypothesis: gen z is the first cohort to enter adulthood after spending a full decade immersed in the curated fantasy-world of instagram during their formative years. this piece speculates that those deeply internalised aesthetics — the maximalism, the glow, the aspirational hyperreality — will eventually be externalised into the physical city once this generation gains cultural influence, economic power, and design agency. the postcard becomes a visual prediction of a world shaped by the subconscious training data of an entire adolescence spent online.
the work also extends ideas from research into the 500-year european project of quantifying emotion — from early philosophical taxonomies to modern affective computing. "berlin 2035" imagines what happens once this trajectory reaches its logical endpoint: where ai, emotional biometrics, and biotech converge to give individuals unprecedented control over mood, identity, and appearance.
in this speculative future, emotional life becomes both measurable and modifiable, and the city becomes an externalisation of this engineered inner world. the postcard reflects a culture where self-optimisation, mood-design, and aesthetic manipulation are no longer side projects but the foundation of everyday life.
by exaggerating berlin’s future into an over-the-top pop-utopia, the work also critiques the pessimism of current speculative design while revealing a deeper generational longing: the desire for a future that feels alive, interconnected, joyful, and visually maximalist. it’s both a provocation and a love letter to the idea that cities can still shift toward collective euphoria rather than collective depression.
[created w/ midjourney]
