Innoversum: Where Innovation Meets the Alps (Innsbruck, 2055)
A speculative glossy magazine cover and feature articles from Innsbruck, No. 324. Created as a sensory artefact (visual, tactile) for the Walk the Futures: Innsbruck Edition in 2025. Artist: Suzanne Whitby.
Overview
This Field Note showcases Innoversum, speculative magazine created for Walk the Futures: Innsbruck Edition, exploring a future world of Growth, where innovation, migration, and economic expansion are celebrated as the engines of progress.
Walk the Futures, an immersive, multi-sensory walkshop exploring alternative futures for Innsbruck.
“When creativity meets climate resilience, growth finds a conscience.”
— Lina Brandstätter, Editor-in-Chief, Innoversum
About this artefact
Title:
Innoversum: Where Innovation Meets the Alps
Year: 2055 (imagined)
Artist: Suzanne Whitby
Created: 2025
About Innoversum
In this imagined 2055, Innsbruck has transformed into Europe’s “innovation valley”: a thriving alpine hub attracting scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs displaced by political turmoil elsewhere. The magazine celebrates this boom through human-interest stories, each one revealing the optimism and blind spots of a society that believes it can innovate its way out of any crisis.
On reading the magazine, you might notice:
- Signals of 2020s reality: references to U.S. climate-research shutdowns, biotech migration, and AI talent mobility give this future strong footing in today’s trends.
- Tone of celebration: Innoversum treats growth as an unquestioned good, framing innovation as destiny rather than choice.
- Visual and linguistic cues: clean typography, lifestyle imagery, and phrases like “Open for Business. Open for the Future.” reflect the seductive aesthetics of prosperity.
During Walk the Futures, participants handle the magazine as a sensory artefact, flipping through imagined interviews and editorials. It feels real (warm, optimistic, aspirational) and that realism sparks deeper conversation about sustainability, inequality, and what kind of growth we truly want.
We invite participants to ask:
What stories of progress do we tell ourselves, and what do they hide?
Bring sensory artefacts to your space
We design speculative artefacts like Innoversum to make abstract futures tangible.
Working with cultural organisations, universities, and municipalities, we create immersive storytelling materials that turn complex ideas into conversation pieces.
Ask us about creating custom sensory artefacts, including magazines, posters, newspapers, and everyday objects that help audiences explore possible futures, alternative presents, or imagined pasts.
Just curious? That’s fine, too. Let’s chat.