How the future is communicated: The complementary roles of words and things in the conveyance of urban air mobility visions

Futures are present-day imaginations. What makes them distinctive is that they are not merely treated as fantasy, but as anticipated presents. At the same time, specific visions of the future are often dismissed as nothing more than fiction. The status of an imagination as a future is therefore not stable but must be produced. The article is dedicated to the question of how this special status of futures is established in the discursive exchange about the future and how futures are differentiated from other current imaginaries. By using the case of the urban air mobility project Pop.Up, we examine how the idea of a flying cab is communicated and therefore realized as a possible future. The article focuses on the use of different media: language, visualizations, and artifacts. Firstly, the study demonstrates that in communicative mediation the future can be conceived as an expectation of an outstanding translation between media. Secondly, it shows that language in particular has a potential to futurize while artifacts such as prototypes primarily serve to presentize.