Under the title The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts (IKSV), organizers of the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial, invited us to respond to the question, “What is the future now?” Our task was to reimagine the manifesto, using this powerful genre as a platform to explore where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be headed.

Driven by a personal interest in America’s obsession with survivalism and “prepping,” we realized that beyond the basic necessities, a personal survival kit could serve as a mini-manifesto, reflecting one’s hopes, fears, interests, and concerns for the future. This led us to consider alternative survival scenarios that reject the bunker mentality, instead engaging with emerging technological changes, environmental conditions, and evolving belief systems.

New Survivalism consists of six alternative survival kits, each representing the survival strategies of distinct protagonists, each with a unique perspective on what they “need.” Each kit is paired with a short narrative text and is featured in an accompanying illustrated fold-out poster booklet, providing a deeper look into the varied approaches to survival.

Conventional survival kits address only the bottom of Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs (the physiological and safety needs of food, water, shelter etc.). Rather than replacing such kits, the alternatives proposed here represent the higher concerns of our protagonists; the protection of culture, the ability to make good decisions, the facility to plan and dream, the provision of access to cheap power, among other things. As thought experiments intended to broaden debate about how we approach the concept of post-disaster scenarios in our culture, these alternative survival kits are intended as a starting point for you to engage with the question “what would you pack for the future?”

The six kits featured from top to bottom:

The Biophotovoltaics Hacktivist is an early adopter of a new green solar technology currently in development at MIT by scientist Andreas Mershin. His research is working on solar cells in which the silicon wafer is replaced by plant material mixed with stabilizing chemicals. The kit contains the equipment and chemicals needed to make these cells, and the container folds out into a solar panel.

The Decision Maker is primarily concerned with losing the ability to make decisions under the pressure of a post-disaster scenario. Her kit is a jacket containing all manner of decision-making and ideas generating aids, from I-Ching coins, Rorschach cards to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

The Futurist Storyteller is concerned with losing the ability to make long term plans, but also to generate fictional stories and dreams for the future. Their Case for Hypothetical Worlds contains objects that represent and symbolize various entities, concepts and phenomena providing thinking tools for new fantasies and realities.

The Object Guardian is a curator who is concerned about saving object histories in the event that museums are wiped out. They have created a ball of miniature iconic objects from the book by the British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, which they carry in an art-crate backpack.

With The Rewilder we wanted to explore what pushing the individualism of survival might look like. This protagonist believes the only way to ensure survival is to become a hunter gatherer. Their kit contains drug therapies and exercise equipment to train themselves to eventually survive without the need for an actual survival kit.

The Seti Reserves Member. The group called SETI – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence uses some of the world’s largest radio telescopes to scan the skies for signs of life on other planets. Supposing these became unavailable, this protagonist is a member of the SETI Reserves, a group of SETI enthusiasts with their own portable radio telescopes that would be linked up as an array in order to continue the search.