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Ten or 20 years ago, the ideas and technologies currently revolutionizing design – 3-D printing, wearable tech, Internet-enabled everything – sounded like the quirky imaginings of a slightly mad inventor. But as they have become integrated into our lives, the sci-fi strangeness has given way to everyday occurrence. So in the decades to come, what we now think of as completely fantastical – walls that eat food waste, couture spacesuits and self-assembling furniture – might actually be run-of-the mill (and not just in movies made by Christopher Nolan or James Cameron). Here, five predictions of what will upend our not-so-distant-futures. Because, in fact, much of it is already, excitingly, in development.

(Paris Tsitsos)

Plastic Surgery

In the 150 years since plastic (as we know it) was invented, it has become ubiquitous. Some of that ubiquity is good: It’s cheap, versatile and easy to mould and manufacture. The sheer omnipresence of plastic, however, is also disastrous: According to a recent study by environmental scientist Marcus Eriksen, there are more than 270,000-tonnes of plastic in our oceans. That plastic poses a serious threat to aquatic life, and by extension, our food supply. But a new proposal by Austrian design firm Livin, along with biologists at Utrecht University, is suggesting a way to divert the waste from the environment by making it safe to eat for humans. Seriously.

Livin’s project is called the Fungi Mutarium, and is comprised of a table-sized, mushroom-growing nursery. Plastic bits are placed into agar-and-glucose-based pods and doused in mycelium liquid, a solution that fosters mushroom growth. As the fungus feeds on both the waste and the sugar, it chews up and purifies any harmful polymers, transforming the inorganic compounds into Pleurotus ostreatus – also known as oyster mushrooms, one of the most commonly grown mushrooms in the world.

And because oyster mushrooms have a unique ability to break down certain plastics without storing any of the toxicity, there could soon be a day when we stop putting plastic in the blue bin and start turning it into cream of mushroom soup instead.

(Neri Oxman/Yoram Reshef Photography Studio)

Survival gear

In TV shows and movies, the future of space travel is glamorous, with human (and quasi-human) astronauts traipsing around space in slick clothing on stylish vessels. But the present-day reality is far less chic. Spaceships are tight and tech-focused, with no room for the statement hats that Whoopi Goldberg used to wear on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The reason for this is simple. In outer space, with the lack of gravity, food or oxygen, the focus has to be on survival, not, sadly, stylish millinery.

But MIT researcher Neri Oxman is proposing a way to fuse couture with intergalactic voyaging. Instead of bulky, white spacesuits, she’s designed a series of brightly coloured, stunningly shaped body wear to sport when out of our solar system. The proposal isn’t just a fashion statement. The 3-D-printed vests, shorts and shirts act essentially like wearable, replacement organs. Each is lined with capillaries that carry the bacteria, food and chemicals necessary for supporting human life. For example, her Mercury shoulder pads – which look like football shoulder pads as reinterpreted for Lady Gaga – are lined with capillaries carrying calcifying bacteria. They act like a self-regenerating exoskeleton to protect our space-weakened bodies from any number of alien encounters.

(Baca Architects)

Amphibious architecture

Among the prevailing images of a postclimate-change world is one of cities and towns that are waterlogged by ruinous floods. But because much of our built infrastructure, and accompanying building codes and engineering standards, aren’t geared toward rising sea levels and more frequent storms, prescient architects are looking for ways to adapt.

For example, in November, 2014, Baca, a London-based architecture firm, completed what it is calling the United Kingdom’s first amphibious house. Built in a flood-prone area of Buckinghamshire, 10 metres from the banks of the River Thames, the house should (if all works according to plan) lift up with any deluge, float and then fall back on its foundation once the river level recedes.

The structure doesn’t look particularly different from the other cottage-like, pitched-roof places in the area. But this 225-square-metre pile was erected over a concrete, water-catching hull, using a buoyant timber frame. And the walls are inset with four concrete posts that guide the house up and down over the water. The basic idea is similar to the moorings at a marina, which prevent boats from drifting away. Although the construction cost a premium – 25 per cent more than a similarly sized, non-floating place – as the idea becomes more necessary, and therefore more common, having a home that floats might become as standard an option as the colour of the siding.

(Steve Marsel Studio)

No assembly required (ever again)

Currently, 3-D printing is upending every manufacturing industry from fashion merchandise to medical prosthesis. And yet, there is already a nascent technology that might eclipse, or at the very least disrupt, on-demand printing. Four-dimensional printing will not only produce things with the ease of an old desktop LaserJet, but spit out objects that are so cleverly composed, they self-assemble, self-repair and adapt to whatever environment they are placed in. Imagine a chair that springs into place when it’s taken off the printing bed because it has kinetic joints. Then imagine the piece morphing into a reclining lounger as soon as the temperature hits 30 degrees because it’s made from a special, heat-responsive material.

The idea is being developed by architect-inventor Skylar Tibbits, who helped establish the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. He speculates 4-D printing will help create more durable and efficient things. Water pipes, for example, which expand and contract to help push fluids along – a bit like the swallowing motions of a throat – as opposed to relying on energy-intensive pumps. Or bricks that expand and contract depending on the loads bearing down on them.

Tibbits is currently researching the technologies, geometries and materials necessary to make it all happen. But the concept is already inspiring other designers. Massachusetts-based studio Nervous System recently 4-D printed a knee-length dress. It comes off the printer as more than 2,000 panels of nylon, densely folded into a cube. When removed from the printing bed, it unfurls into a floral cocktail frock. It requires no assembly, unlike a traditional garment that is stitched together from multiple panels. And because the nylon panels are held together by more than 3,000 tiny, embedded hinges, it effortlessly changes shape as the wearer moves.

(Colt International Arup)

Social organisms

The most lauded architecture of the past tends to be the grandest: palaces for princes and cathedrals for cardinals. Although superior design is intrinsically linked to wealth (buildings cost lots of money, after all), the most remarkable designs of the future might just be humbler – the ones that offer significant, if not sexy, solutions to society’s many pressing problems.

Rachel Armstrong is one thinker hoping to shift the profession. She is both a professionally trained doctor (who has worked at a leprosy hospital in India), and a professor of experimental architecture at Newcastle University in England. Her work bridges a combined love of design and biology, and looks for ways to mitigate issues like overpopulated cities, which lack arable agricultural land and space for waste (human or otherwise).

One of her possible solutions is to build homes with bricks impregnated with microbes that break down kitchen refuse – diverting old banana peels from over-clogged landfills and turning them into bioluminescent lighting, energy for heat or fertilizer for an in-house garden. The idea isn’t so far-fetched. Armstrong points to an innovative apartment complex built in Hamburg in 2013, by international engineering firm Arup. Called BIQ House, the 15-unit building has biochemical, algae-lined walls that use photosynthesis to heat the dwellings within.