Imagining Tomorrow: How failed predictions shaped the world

From tarot cards to an uranium-glass plate; from an early vision of fast fashion to a board game designed by futurologists, Manchester Museum’s new exhibition The Artefacts of Prediction: Imagining Tomorrowexplores how people have tried to glimpse, design, or control what comes next.

Launched in December, the exhibition is part of a British Academy project, ‘Getting it Wrong: The Limits to Prediction’, led by Dr Lise Butler, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at City St George’s, University of London. The project team includes Dr Maria Christou, a literature scholar at the University of Manchester; historian Dr Or Rosenboim (formerly at City, now at the University of Bologna), and Dr Ruth Morgan, a historian of the environment based in Australia.

Imagining Tomorrow draws on objects from science, fashion, design, and popular culture to reveal how ideas about the future often reflect the hopes, fears, and technologies of their own time.

In 2023, Dr Butler and her co-investigators won a British Academy grant to carry out research on the limits of prediction. The project has included workshops at the University of Cambridge and the University of Bologna, a podcast series ‘The Art and Artifice of Prediction’, and now the Imagining Tomorrow exhibition.

A specialist in modern British political history and left-wing politics, Dr Butler has long held an interest in the history of forecasting and its role in British policymaking. She argues these past visions continue to shape our world today.

Her book Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70 researched the Committee on the Next Thirty Years, a British government body that in the late 1960s tried to use social scientific expertise to help policy makers predict the future.

“I am also interested in how ideas about the future contributed to the rise of New Labour in the 1990s,” she adds, “I am currently looking at how ‘Third Way’ sociological visions of economic and social change helped to justify the Labour Party’s move to the political centre.”

Discussing her and her co-investigators’ vision for the exhibition, she said:

We were interested in how scientific and social scientific modes of prediction, like the Cold War vogue for future studies and forecasting, coexisted with the rising popularity of occult and metaphysical practices of prediction, like horoscopes and tarot cards.

The exhibition shows that prediction is not just a scientific or expert-led process – and that during times of social and technological change people look to magic and mysticism as well as science to try to make sense of what is to come.

The exhibition and workshops were focused on the act of predicting itself – how people have tried to imagine and manage the future in their own present.

I hope visitors to the exhibition will reflect upon how the buildings they live in, the food they eat, and the entertainment they consume might reflect the legacies of past predictions, and think about how they are engaging with the future in their own life.

Planning an exhibition was a rewarding new challenge for Dr Butler and her academic co-investigators, who were “helped enormously” by the curatorial team Renée Melton Klein and Connie Evans.

The items and artwork were selected, purchased, and commissioned by the project team, as well as loaned from private collections and the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.

Imagining tomorrow runs until June 2026 at the Manchester Museum. View the exhibition page and keep up to date on the Imagining Tomorrow project by visiting its website.