Written by: Dave Owen

A brave new world for picnicking

Wherever you are in the world, having a picnic can be brilliant or it can be awful. You painstakingly carry food and drink, a blanket, and a swingball set (essential) to a lush patch of grass overlooking a sparkling ocean, a rippling pasture, or your neighbour's dog emptying its bowels. Just as you've laid out the spread your knees are already aching from sitting cross-legged, you find ants in the coleslaw, a wasp stings your eyelid, and your iPhone runs out of charge, putting a premature end to your carefully selected playlist of straight up summer bangers.

Welcome to the cruel world of picnicking.

But all that could be about to change. A space age backpack known as 'Technopicnic' has been developed, fitting a portable table, cushions, speakers, lights, a screen, and USB hubs into something you can strap easily onto your back.

The self-styled saviours of the picnic are designers Eugenio Fernandez and Victor Nouman from Atelier Teratoma, who claim that the tradition of picnicking needs to be updated for the modern day.

"The Technopicnic is designed for a nomad individual that requires certain technologies wherever he goes, exactly like an astronaut," the duo explained. "We believe that today the natural setting for a picnic should be the epicentre of the city – the square."

Still in the prototyping stages, the Technopicnic set includes a solar panel to make it self-sufficient, a screen to receive messages via bluetooth, USB hubs to charge phones and other kit, speakers to bring the party, and lights to illuminate your surroundings/make sure your selfies are good enough to go on Tinder. It also has a table and cupholders, the bits that actually help improve a picnic instead of turning it into a dystopian nightmare.

We recently published an article on what your choice of backpack says about you. What people will think of someone carrying a Technopicnic around the world remains to be seen.