MeWee Monitor performs continuous, persistent biological monitoring to deliver a multi-dimensional assessment of current state.
From alcohol levels to hormone quotients, color, pH, nitrates, glucose, nitrite, ketone, hemoglobin, erythrocytes, leukocytes, protein mineral—uploading them to your online data profile to share with your family and friends or proprietary assessor algorithms.
Link your biometrics to Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Tumblr and more!
In the US and Africa, you may be eligible for Medicaid assistance.
Purchase price includes three months of online service. WPA, WEP, TKIP, EAP wireless security. Data backup options also available.
Thirteen years ago I published this “MeWee Monitor” toilet from some likely future as one of a hundred or so speculative product concepts in TBD Catalog—a near-future department-store catalog from another timeline. It was a bookmark from the future: an intimation that toilets would become “smart.”
(In the 10-year anniversary edition, the “smart” idiom updated itself to OpenAI.)
Back then, smart was trending—homes, doors, pills, cars, everything. So it wasn’t a stretch to imagine a smart toilet. What mattered was the way we used fiction to surface the cultural logic behind that inevitability.
Design Fiction isn’t prediction. It’s a method for making the abstract tangible—a way to embody trends, hopes, and anxieties so they can be discussed, debated, and designed with, not just around. A prototype like MeWee Monitor doesn’t forecast; it makes meaning felt.
And now, here we are.
Kohler has announced Dekoda—a toilet with optical sensors, cameras, and machine learning, marketed as a “health platform.” Almost word-for-word the same proposition, only minus the irony (unless it’s not). Fiction has leaked into the present.
Moments like this reveal something important: once a logic exists—say, the quantification of the self—it will find expression, whether as satire, speculation, or SKU.
That’s both comforting and disheartening.
Comforting, because it means the future has structure; disheartening, because it shows how narrow the corridors of imagination have become. It’s as if imagination itself has been automated. The future keeps filling in the blanks we’ve already drawn.
The true value of Design Fiction, then, isn’t prediction.
It’s prototyping; that is rehearsing possibilities before committing to them.
It lets organizations play with trajectories, explore adjacencies, and reveal hidden opportunities before they solidify into strategy or product.
Design Fiction is how teams can experiment with the future in the present—the way R&D once explored new technologies before quarterly metrics eclipsed curiosity. It gives companies a safe way to ask what if when the usual tools can only ask what’s next.
In a world where everyone is optimizing toward the same KPIs, Design Fiction restores the ability to imagine differently—to explore not just the next product cycle, but the next possible world in which that product might matter.
The future isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s an expansive terrain of possibilities, waiting to be mapped by those willing to speculate boldly and prototype imaginatively.
Want to prototype your organization’s near future?
I run workshops and engagements that transform foresight into tangible artifacts—mock catalogs, prototypes, and cultural signals that make imagination actionable. Let’s talk about how Design Fiction can expand your strategic and creative edge