What will the world look like in 100 years? To answer that ambitious question, a group of forward-thinking Trinity students is looking for input from the College community.
As a next step after Trinity’s 200th anniversary—which was celebrated in 2023—The 2123 Project invites students, faculty, staff, and alumni to imagine what life could look like about 100 years from now.
“We are gathering ideas from all across campus about inventions, products, and daily life to envision the year 2123. We’re building off of Trinity’s Bicentennial and looking ahead to the Tercentennial,” said Patrick Manswell ’27, a computer science major from Baltimore, Maryland. To submit thoughts or predictions about the future within the themes of transportation, living in cities, work and education, health and medicine, and entertainment and communication, click here.
The 2123 Project draws inspiration from a set of 78 visionary trading cards designed by a German chocolatier for the 1900 World’s Fair that predicted innovations like video calls and robotic vacuums long before they became a reality. “With ideas from the Trinity community that we collect, we plan to create A.I.-generated art for our own set of trading cards that capture visions of the future,” Manswell said. The results will be displayed in an exhibit at the Mather Art Gallery later this spring.
Manswell is working on this initiative as one of four Trinity students who completed the University Innovation Fellows program run by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) last fall. The other Trinity students in this group are: Gabriel Koomson ’27, a double major in computer science and economics from Ghana; Denise Pedraza Guzman ’27, a chemistry major from Norwalk, Connecticut; and Luna Tariku Sefu ’27, an engineering major with a concentration in electrical engineering from Ethiopia.
The intensive six-week training to become University Innovation Fellows empowers students from around the world to be agents of change at their schools, according to the program. Last year, 164 students from 44 higher education institutions in 13 countries were named University Innovation Fellows. The Fellows will gather for a conference in April at the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands.
For the Trinity students in this program, The 2123 Project is the culmination of their time as University Innovation Fellows. Sefu said, “The extent to which we are taking this project is beyond what was expected in the program. The team wanted to really make this impactful.”
This team initially was formed by Koomson, who became familiar with design thinking during a gap year, when he participated in the “Map the System” design challenge organized by the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Koomson worked with Danny Briere, executive director of Trinity’s Entrepreneurship Center, to connect with the Stanford program. On campus, the group also has worked with Joseph Catrino, former executive director of career and life design, and Carlos Espinosa, director of community relations and strategic partnerships.
Briere said that the students have found that when investigating possible future innovations, most of the things people guess will be in place by 2123 could actually be in place within 25 or 50 years. “Singularity—that point when A.I. surpasses human intelligence—is expected within 25 years,” he said. “Extensive populations on Mars within 50 years. One-hundred years—that’s really far out there.”
While Manswell and Pedraza Guzman handle the forward-looking half of the project, Koomson and Sefu are developing the part of the forthcoming exhibit that features historical trading cards from the 1870s onward, showcasing how past generations envisioned the future. “One-hundred years into the future is really hard to imagine, so we hope to motivate people to think beyond what is possible,” Sefu said. “The training we did empowered us to think innovatively, and we hope to encourage people to do the same.”
Pedraza Guzman said that the group intends to engage with the Trinity community in several ways. “We want to collaborate with as many students as possible,” she said. “We’ll be in Mather gathering ideas from students. We are also reaching out to student clubs and organizations to talk with them at meetings and events.” The project organizers will consult with an advisory board to plan what to include in the exhibit, which will be designed with help from art majors and students with interest or expertise in A.I.
Koomson added that the group members wanted to share their knowledge about creative problem-solving with the College in a way that encouraged broad collaboration. “Having the Trinity community as stakeholders in our particular project has been very fulfilling,” he said. “I am of the opinion that a people that do not know their past have no business talking about a future. I hope that the community uses this exercise as an opportunity to reflect on their past experiences and use them as compasses to make bold predictions for their futures and set goals worth pursuing.”
The students leading The 2123 Project have a few of their own thoughts on what the world could be like in 100 years: Koomson imagines frequent human trips to space; Manswell predicts that new groups will advocate for the rights of robots, much like PETA does for animals today; Pedraza Guzman envisions lifesaving 3-D printed organs; and Sefu thinks new materials will strengthen buildings from increasingly harsh climate catastrophes.
The 2123 Project is gathering ideas about the future using this form until the end of March. The exhibition in the Mather Art Gallery will open April 12; Trinity College President Joanne Berger-Sweeney and the students who created the project are scheduled to speak at the gallery on April 21.
