Future Shoch: An exhibition of final year degree projects at Southampton Institute

摘要

One of the best ways of attracting attention to any exhibition is to give it an interesting title, and those who organised the exhibition of final-year degree projects from the Faculty of Technology's courses at Southampton Institute certainly knew how to do this, with the provocative title 'Future Shock' and some eye-catching brightly coloured graphics for their leaflets and posters. Those who remember Toffler's influential 1970 book of the same title, with its vision of society plunging into an uncontrollable and accelerating technological future, might perhaps wonder at the title's relevance to the Southampton exhibition, but his later work, in which he envisioned a new society structured around an all pervading framework of information technology, leading to a happier and more diverse social structure, perhaps provides the real connection, with this exhibition providing many pointers to a world in which technology really is used to benefit mankind.