Over twenty years ago Philips Design published a collection of concepts they called called ‘Vision of the Future’. It was intended to, ‘explore ideas for products and services which could be part of our future in the year 2005’.

I personally encountered this collection of designs at a BBC Tomorrow’s World event in 1996. Since then, I’ve been slowly checking off the different products as they become available: we might now be twelve years past the target year, but it remains truly amazing how prescient this work is and how many of the products now exist.

Perhaps the one thing they didn’t anticipate was the wide reaching impact of today’s smartphones and tablets; these all-purpose devices serve many of the functions of those envisaged by Philips.

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Philips also published an in-house book featuring presenting the designs here in more detail. Jonty very kindly acquired one for me which I hope to digitise at some point.

Update, September 2020: I finally got around to scanning the book.