How Coupland sees the future

"We wanted to have a future that was plausible and believable. One of the strange things about the future, and one of the hardest things to believe about it, is that it?s going to be a lot like right now.

"One of the easiest ways to approach the future is to look around you in the room you?re in, right now, wherever you are, and ask yourself "What about this room would be really amazing to someone from a hundred years from now? Would it be cigarette smoke? Would it be leather? Would it be the weather outside the windows?" The thing about the future is what changes the most are the things you would expect the least change from.

"An enormous factor in daily life in the future is going to be that information is everywhere. There?s nothing you can touch, look at, smell, whatever, that isn?t just rich with applied information. I think if someone from the year 1952 was to come to the year two thousand and two, oh good Lord, they?d just be swamped, I think, at the amount of information. It would just send them into a coma it?s so dense now, but we?re used to it, and that density is going to increase and increase.

"I think the way that creative people who make films or write books or whatever art form, their job, our job is to plant seeds, and that?s all you can do.

"When it comes to the future I?m not really interested in seeing great big tall wow buildings, or anything like that. I want to look inside someone?s house. I want to see what their living room looks like, I want to see what their kitchen looks like, I just want to see their pet. I want to see that kind of thing. I want to see what trash looks like in the future. What are people going to throw out and what are they going to consider valuable? Will it be noisy? Will it be quiet?

"That to me is very important in creating a plausible future, and again I have to stress that this whole exercise is about creating a plausible future, which is something we don?t do very much anymore. I think the future's kind of scary. But it?s a wonderful exercise."