RoboCop is useful for Design Fiction because its world arrives through ordinary media forms: television news, commercials, public tone, product promises, and the vernacular visual culture people already know how to read. It's an approach Paul Verhoeven has used in many of his films, and it is a powerful way to build possible worlds that feel familiar enough to be thought about, argued with, and felt into. This note is a companion to the Near Future Laboratory newsletter Week 24 Year 26, which follows that thread through RoboCop, the OMATA Annual Report From The Future, AI stand-ins, AI farming, and an Office Hours conversation about neurodivergent futures of work.

Week 23 Year 26 follows a thread through the history of art+tech, from MoMA's Talk to Me catalogue and Matt Webb's Poem/1 clock to local human-powered AI, civic futures work in Italy, and a speculative impacts role from an adjacent now. The issue is about how the meaning of art+tech changes as the surrounding world changes, and why small objects, catalogs, civic processes, and job descriptions can all become useful materials for thinking with possible futures.

Office Hours N°310 moved through simulation as a useful lie, design tuned to context, AI-made tools and the validation problem, research with children, parenting and surveillance, owning your social stack, agentic editorial infrastructure, vibe coding discipline, radio as a testbed for taste, and Rick's relational citation riff.

Office Hours N°309 began with Peter's analog proof-of-humanity intervention at the beach, then moved through trust, AI avatars, surveillance, locality, embodied social experience, reciprocity, education, and Rick's phrase "the frequency of compassion."

I'll be participating A special Denver premiere screening of Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions on May 29, 2026 at the MCA Denver Holiday Theater, presented by Biennial of the Americas, MATTER, MCA Denver, and Sundance Film Festival.

A Design Fiction Dispatch about agentic appliances, intelligent home systems, and the service economy that appears when everyday autonomy needs repair, realignment, emotional labor, liability models, and practical maintenance.

Notes from an EPIC People Learning Week conversation I had with Jay Hasbrouck on organizational imagination where we wondered — how companies can keep enough imaginative range to notice unfamiliar possibilities, how speculative artifacts and ethnographic thinking can make those possibilities discussable, and why AI should be treated as more than an efficiency machine.

A Design Fiction Dispatch about AI-Standard Farming, Heritage Produce, and the artifacts that let us spot weak signals from today as they settle into tomorrow's institutions, certifications, jobs, rituals, compromises, and operating models.

The signals of autonomous agentic businesses and the prevalance of those autonomous food delivery boxes collide in a world in which self-directed food trucks start to go into business for “themselves.” In this speculative prototype, research points to agentic platforms appearing that choose menus, routes, and run social promotions without human oversight. This is a research practice called speculative or anticipatory research. It is a way to explore the implications of emerging phenomena, weak signals, and vague trends by creating plausible scenarios that can be examined in more detail. While it may look like science fiction, it is actually a form of research that helps us understand the potential impacts of new technologies and social changes before they become fully realized. This feature is a speculative prototype: a plausible news article from a near future where autonomous agentic systems have moved from assisting small businesses to behaving like businesses themselves. It is grounded in signals already visible around AI agents,...