
We don’t know about you, but we find it really fun to look at predictions from the past to see how they shook out. Here’s a look at six ways designers and futurists thought our homes would look today.
At Angie’s List, they gathered up predictions about how the future would look and then hired a team to render those predictions as 3D images. The image above is inspired by 1980s-era predictions based on those made by the design team for Back to the Future II:
In the 1980s, Tim Flattery and Edward Eyth were put to work imagining the year 2015 for the makers of Back to the Future II. “We were highly motivated to make it so we didn’t look like fools in 25 years,” according to Eyth. Their unused bathroom design foresaw the smart home with a wall-bound “computerized family diagnosis & medical treatment center”—even if we’re not quite there yet.
The pair also reinvented bathing with their “horizontal bio-cleanse environ.” These individual sanitation chambers use steam-spray and “sani-ray” laser lights to scrub you clean. If you have the space for it, this centrally-oriented hygiene control center makes for a pretty cool sci-fi bathroom in which to unwind after a day out on your hoverboard.
While we’ve definitely seen very cool mirrors with screens in them at the Consumer Electronics Show over the years, we definitely haven’t seen scrubbing laser lights—so we’ll call this one a bit of a mixed bag.
For more insights into what the people of the past thought the future of bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, and more would hold, you can check out the whole article and accompanying pictures here.