The Jetsons Have Arrived

Posted: January 29th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: design | Tags: design, designers, innovative design, Marc Newson, modernism, popular culture, shopping, trends

I was enthralled by the title of Chip Brown’s article on designer Marc Newson in this mornings New York Times Magazine: ”The Future Isn’t Futuristic Anymore”. Brown contends that Newson was captivated by the space-age utopia depicted on the Jetsons, but that while his own aesthetic over the years has been influenced by that paradigm, Newson has been disappointed by reality – by the fact of that future not panning out and leaving him feeling that “the future isn’t futuristic anymore.” I struggled over the course of the article to digest this assertion, since it runs seemingly directly contrary to an observation I have made repeatedly over the last decade or so — that the world we live in is, in fact, the world of the Jetsons. Sure, not exactly. We aren’t buzzing around from place to place in our personal little flying capsules, yada yada yada… But a lot of that vision has come true. (See Bob Sassone’s clever little piece on HuffPost Tv from a few years ago titled “So How Accurate Was The Jetsons?“)