'Cool Cellulose' is a speculative children's magazine that illustrates the future of our planet. It was conceptualised as a physical product in the year 2100, being produced and published as a tribute to the age-old and now long-lost craft of paper-making. By reviving this rare and cherished tradition, the magazine would serve as a celebration of a bygone era where natural resources were abundant but casually utilised. With ‘Cool Cellulose’, readers would be transported to a future where the effects of environmental degradation and climate change are not directly depicted, but satirically encrypted into the stories and the world those are set in. The abstract of the magazine presents the publication as a product of 100% organic intelligence, something that is extremely rare now that artificial intelligence has taken over.
Even though it is a children's magazine, it is targeted towards the adults of today – parents, guardians and teachers, who care about the future of their children and have influence and agency in driving a meaningful change. Using humour and irony, we tried to simplify complex issues and offer a new perspective, one which is jarring for us but seems unusually normal for the characters in the magazine, where they seem to have adapted to the ‘new normal’. For example, corn is the only food that is produced and consumed, and is highly marketed as a superfood throughout the magazine. As the children of the future might not really understand the idea of physical books, the magazine is detailed with instructions that seem obvious for us today, for example how to turn a page or the fact that one cannot scroll or edit a page.
