The Smithsonian has announced plans for an interactive exhibition inviting visitors to collaborate with AI, and each other, in designing their ideal city. The “FUTURES” exhibition, opening in November 2021, will be among the first to pilot an experimental new way of designing inclusive cities, which the organizers say, “invites the public to bring their creativity and sense of play to co-design better, greener communities in real time, introducing a powerful generative artificial intelligence as their new design partner.”

Hosted by the museum’s historic Arts + Industries Building, FUTURES will feature exhibits that explore human collaboration, and puts forward visions for how people can become more connected and inclusive in everyday life. Designed by architect David Rockwell and his award-winning firm Rockwell Group, the exhibition offers almost 32,000 square feet of immersive installations, experiments, and “artifacts of the future,” and seeks to showcase the stories of people working towards a more equitable, peaceful, sustainable world.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is “The Co-Lab,” a 22-foot-tall cantilevering structure inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House and the utopian visions of Yona Friedman and Constant Nieuwenhuys. The structure was designed by The Living, an Autodesk Research Studio, who used AI to generate ideas beyond typical human design rules that still met strict goals of weight, strength, ease of assembly and disassembly, and a small footprint. Despite the structure’s one-of-a-kind complexity, its construction used just 60 timber beams, 25 joints, and minimal waste.

“The Co-Lab” structure hosts a digital interactive system called “Future Communities,” inviting friends and strangers to collaborate with each other and artificial intelligence to design their ideal future city block. Each visitor plays as a different “persona” with their own social, climate, and economic goals, putting forward visions and decisions on their environment. The generative AI system will compute thousands of these solutions in real time to drive the city block’s evolution, manifesting skyscrapers, parks, wellness features, carbon footprint targets and other user inputs. Throughout the exhibition, the team expects thousands of visions to be created, each unique to the group or community that imagined and built it.

FUTURES will be the first exhibition to take place in the museum’s Arts + Industries Building (AIB) for almost two decades – representing a new chapter for the United States’ first National Museum, which opened in 1881. The event also forms part of the Smithsonian’s 175th anniversary, described as “the Smithsonian’s first major building-wide exploration of the culture, fusing art, technology, design, and history to invite visitors to dream big and imagine not just one future, but many possible futures on the horizon.”

FUTURES will be free and open to the public from November 2021 through July 2022.