My cabinet of rarities in 2050:
When thinking about this topic as a whole and my own involvement within it I like to wonder what my own personal cabinet of rarities would look like if it would be displayed in 2050 in a museum or some other exhibition. What items do I think won’t be used or very prominent in 2050 that I used intensively in my youth and young adulthood. I then wanted to write this blogpost about this to share my thoughts and hopefully inspire people to think about this topic as well.
I would mostly select items due to nostalgia, good memories or because they had some sort of impact on my life and mostly during my youth and young adulthood. I think it would be very diverse due to my broad interests and things I find cool and would want to keep forever and show people to remember objects that are special to me. I would however find it hard to select items to not create a garage box of rarities due to the extreme amount of items I would probably select. So I will try to keep it as trimmed down as possible.
To start I would like to list the items within categories and list some of my hobbies they relate to, to create an overview of the objects and what they mean to me.
First of all, games. Games and gaming have been a big part of my life. I started with gaming when I was around 7 years old. I had a Nintendo DS as a kid and a Nintendo WII I used intensively. Later I had a PlayStation 2 and a Xbox.
Some of these older consoles have already become redundant and aren’t being supported anymore. This is due to new advancements within graphics, build quality and more sophisticated systems. I do have big nostalgic feelings for these consoles and the games so they will be in the cabinet as memories and to show them to other people.
I played games like Mario kart, Pokémon, LEGO games, and racing games like need for speed.
I also played a certain game series called Skylanders.
This certain game has already kind off disappeared due to financial issues but I have very fond memories of it and I feel like it sadly will never come back so that’s why I am putting it in my cabinet. About this topic I furthermore want to say that I don’t think gaming and games itself will disappear in 2050 because it’s still so popular. But I believe that games itself and how we play games will certainly change over the years. I feel like gaming will become much more focused on virtual and simulator technology where people will have the ability to escape the real world and enter a digital gaming world. My mind thinks of examples like the movie ‘’Ready player ONE’’ in which people can live and function in a fully virtual world to escape the harshness of the real world.
Next up, a big topic for me, toys. I love toys and with that, many kinds of them. I am quite a collector so I always collected many items of different brands and toy companies as a kid and also as an adult. Toys I play(ed) a lot with are prominently LEGO, Hot wheels, other model cars and Transformers. Shown below are some pictures of my own toys of the properties.
I don’t think these toys will ever disappear seeing how popular and relevant they still are today and probably always will be in the future. While I think these toys will (hopefully) stick around for many more years after 2050, I think they will definitely change from the way that I know them. I think that maybe more digital and AI related elements will find its way within the toys within the aspects of designing, storytelling and engagement with kids. I also think that the build quality and production methods will change massively within more sophisticated materials, quality and sustainability innovations.
Furthermore something I would put in my cabinet is objects related to older cars I am into. These are mostly Japanese and European cars from the 90s and early 2000nds. Examples I like most are the Nissan skylines from that time, the Mazda mx5 Miata, older BMW’s and some super cars like Ferraris.
If I could I would put one car in my cabinet (more like garage unit) of rarities or some of the parts/pictures. I feel like these could be a good edition because I grew up with these and during this of writing (2024), they already have become more rare and redundant. I think that in 2050 you will rarely see one at all in the wild and maybe only in private collections or museums and they will probably not get used anymore due to old technology, new types of transportations restrictions/regulations, and types of fuel that they use. I would find this very sad because I feel like they are some technical marvels that stand for many enthusiasts and car culture. But that’s why I would put them in my cabinet to honour them.
To give an impression of what my cabinet of rarities would look like, I asked AI (Microsoft copilot) to create some examples. I asked it to include the topics I talked about in this post. It would look like this if it was my inner child and collector selecting all the cool items and placing it nicely inside of a cabinet to show it with pride to people. It would include old games and consoles I played with, cars, LEGO, Transformers and maybe also combinations. I would also like it if people would be able to add their own objects to make it an ever-growing cabinet of sorts to keep remembering certain items and keep the nostalgia alive!
