At the Institute for the Future, we're big fans of videos of futures past. This 1975 1960s Braniff commercial about the future of supersonic air travel is a perfect example, complete with video phones, jetpacks, myriad personal robots, and plenty of Aarnio-esque egg chairs. In fact, the oddest thing to me about this commercial is that it was produced in the mid-70s but the furniture and clothing is very 60s space age.
Over at Future Now, my colleague Alex Pang comments on this artifact from the history of the future:
* The design tries really hard to Look Like the Future. Everyone is wearing these robe-and-cowl things (the women look like Bene Gesserit going clubbing). Chairs have been replaced by giant eggs. (Perhaps in the future people are hatched; the commercial doesn't go there, thankfully.)
* Absolutely ordinary human activities have been automated. People don't walk any more: instead, their chairs are pushed around by robots or something.
* More seriously, the commercial makes the classic mistake of positing vast technological changes, with no accompanying social changes. When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female. This is something you see in lots of "home of the future" exhibits. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about this (PDF) so eloquently, it should be called the Nunberg Error.
Link to Future Now, Link to video on YouTube
UPDATE: Suzy at Blogway Baby points to evidence that this video was most likely made in the 1960s and meant to show how air travel would look circa 1975. Link (Thanks, Grad Conn!)
Related are Emilio Pucci's vintage designs for Braniff International flight attendant uniforms.
Link and Link (via cityofsound)
