This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
What if shopping in 2050 takes us back to the traditional local market, but with robots? Self-stacking stalls of "kilometre-zero" fruit and vegetables will communicate their place of origin and convey other data about themselves. Everyone will be both producer and buyer.
This is the vision of Italian architect Carlo Ratti (director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab in Boston) and Italian supermarket chain Coop, to be presented at the Milan World Expo 2015. Ratti's Future Food District is a 9,500m<sup>2</sup> space consisting of a supermarket and a kitchen from the future, plus a public piazza. "We're designing the skin for the buildings out of living algae, which will absorb and store sunlight and extract energy from it," he says. "Inside, visitors will get to explore how food is evolving."
In Ratti's ideal supermarket, shoppers gather around huge sloping tables, where fresh produce slots in from an automated, underground warehouse. "The products will be able to communicate everything known about them at any given moment," he says. Above each table is a mirrored screen, controlled by a gesture-activated system using Kinect-like motion sensors. Move your hands over a product and a detailed label will pop up. "We also want a real-time visualisation above the checkout counters that sketches all the products arriving and leaving the marketplace, creating an infographic that shows you the real guts of the operation," says Ratti. The aim is to reconnect consumers with food networks.
In a second of Ratti's buildings -- the Food Lab -- seven live cooking stands will let you sample some of the latest food innovations. "This will be where you'll try your first freshly 3D-printed pasta," Ratti says. The buildings, which have already been designed, will be built over the next year and displayed at the World Expo from May 2015 onwards.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
