The Village of the Future franchise starts to seem kind of obvious once you think about it. Manufacturers need to showcase prototypes, and are doing so, but you don’t go to a furniture store to sleep on the bed. If you’ve never slept on a bed before, maybe try a hotel? But what if you just want to test a particular model of mattress, as seen on TV?
What if a specific hotel advertised itself as a mattress testing facility, and when you booked a room, you could choose which room based on which type of mattress it had. You might even get coupons to stay there in exchange for your testimony. Attend a focus group, fill out some surveys… is there a pool?
Is this all starting to sound a bit silly? Otherwise it would’ve been tried already right?
But then rental car agencies serve a similar purpose: people thinking they might buy a Tesla or Toyota of a certain model, maybe rent one first. Sure, the dealer allows test driving but who wants to deal with a dealer right off the bat?
That could be further down in the decision tree (or up, depending on your decision tree’s orientation).
Here we’re not talking cars or beds so much as dwelling machines, akin to travel or destination trailers. But they’re not trailers. Closer to yurts. Some are domes. We might even feature some newfangled tents, nearer the sound stage, for use by performers and crew.
The units might’ve even been helicopter delivered, per comic books of the 1900s, a future come true.
Or they’re assembled on site, but from kits that get delivered from the factory, perhaps with a mix-in of local materials. They’re “manufactured homes” one could say, but that term has already been taken.
You will easily find prototypes such as the ones I’m talking about made in China. Russia has already staged this kind of showcase village outside of Moscow, ala the furniture store model. One tours, sure, but one does not move in for a period of days and live the lifestyle.
That would be for a different type of establishment: a Village of the Future with “timeshare” (another taken term). These might become School of Tomorrow facilities overnight, if the prototypes, some of them, became widely adopted for civilian use.
Since these units are already being factory produced in Eurasia, and since Belt and Road has come a long way, the infrastructure is in place.
The first Villages of the Future businesses will likely not be in North America, EPCOT notwithstanding, as the political leaders in those bioregions seem at a different point when it comes to melodrama and acting out.
The US federation’s educational system still predisposes folks to long for a “white picket fence” whatever that is. Their ruling donor class is more interested in leisure for themselves than in designing a smart society. We’d need something more demur as a setting, for our startups.
But then this is way too broad brush stroke a characterization. North America is far from some uniform blend or ethnicity, Praise Allah.
Picture little dots. These little campgrounds of the future will be spread around like granules of salt and pepper, other spices, and like the other franchises already dotting the planet, especially in Africa, where village life is not unknown.
