For decades, translucent plastic and glowing colors meant progress, optimism, and technological magic. Yesterday I wrote about Jell-O losing relevance as consumer tastes pushed away from artificiality. But the product accomplished something pretty extraordinary during its 125-year life, as an accidental side-effect of its popularity. It became embedded in what the future would look like. Think about the visual language of “the future” throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The...