The Future Wasteland

It’s ironic how although mankind seems to be very aware of the damage it’s doing to the environment, we are more willing to embrace a doomsday worst case scenario than decide to stop using fossil fuels to power our nations or petrol to transport us around.

Britain’s move towards nuclear power has been very slow, and it is only recently that they have been allowed to be constructed on a scale that rivals the rest of Europe. But the fear of hazardous waste still remains.

Imagine 10,000 years down the line, when society has evolved so far that language is not even a fragment of what it once was. If we store our nuclear waste in bunkers deep underground, how can we prevent our descendants from unearthing them? How can you create a sign to invoke fear and caution without using language? How can you communicate with a society that we know nothing about? Designers have been working to find a solution to this problem for many years.

But this task is far from easy, it is like trying to communicate with someone who is blind deaf and dumb and you don’t know.

Even modern semiotics which can be understood across cultures and languages may not be suitable. Warning images sounds and even smells (like the smell put in natural gas) may not have the same connotations to a civilisation completely detached from our own.

On the bright side, since the people we are trying to communicate with, live so far in future, we actually have a very long time to figure this out, which gives the design the opportunity to change, grow and evolve along side us, if our culture feels it is suitably pertinent to do so at the time.

Murphy, D. (2006) Design Like You Give A Damn, New York: Metropolis books

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/05/30/nuke30.xml