From 16. November 2017 to 28. February 2018, the “Empathic Futures” exhibition can be seen at Financial DRIVE, Volkswagen Group Forum, Unter den Linden in Berlin. The exhibition presents the results of the research project funded by Volkswagen Stiftung to explore the Future of Human-Machine Relationships.
»Machines and transportation systems are becoming increasingly complex and more intelligent. How will we develop trust in these machines and how can we communicate with them?
Empathic Futures wants to explore these questions and open up new perspectives on the future – by creating a space for debate and inspiration and by inviting you to imagine, speculate and dream.« – Empathic Futures
Michael Markert was working for Feld Studio Berlin for this research project to design and create the Interface for the Archive Explorer Frontend for the exhibition. He designed, developed and implemented the mobile frontend, as well as parts of the exhibition website. The Empathic Futures Archive Explorer was featured in the exhibition:
Empathic Futures Exhibition
Financial DRIVE, Volkswagen Group Forum
Unter den Linden 19a
10117 Berlin
Video by Feld
Creating an Archive of Human-Machine Communication
Planned, designed and realized for the Volkswagen Group Future Center Europe, Empathic Futures is an interactive and participatory exhibition about developing trust between humans and autonomous systems. Its aim is to inspire the public to imagine and shape a future in which empathy serves as a guiding principle for human-machine communication. – Feld Studio for Digital Crafts
Empathic Futures is a research collaboration between FELD studio for digital crafts and Volkswagen Group Future Center Europe that explores the future of human-machine relationships by looking at the way humans communicate with and build trust in machines. The findings of this project are presented at the Empathic Futures exhibition. At the core of the exhibition stands an app experiment in which 500 participants communicated for 5 days with their personal mobility-related Empathic Intelligence (E.I.). The goal of the interactive exhibition is to provide an inspiring platform for future-oriented and challenging questions, debates and ideas.
Empathy and communication are important building blocks for trust between humans. Increasingly, machines are starting to speak our language – what does this feel like? How will we communicate with the intelligent machines of the future? And how can we build trust between humans and machines?
The aim of the experiment was to inspire participants to think about the possibilities of human-machine communication and relationships.
Since every human being is unique, every conversation is different – explore the entire archive here: explore.empathicfutures.com
Links
- Studio Feld (2017) Empathic Futures. A Look Into the Future of Mobility (Accessed: 26 Jan 2025)
- Empathic Futures (2017) Exhibition Website (empathicfutures.com via Wayback Archive)
- Empathic Futures (2017) Project Website (empathicfutures.com/?id=explore is unfortunately offline)
- Studio Feld (2017) Experiments Future

