Sabrina Sullivan discussed the Calgary Futures Forum; Alex Kauffmann demonstrated hand-powered local AI; Rodney Frederickson shared tools for tracing how images change over time.

Music sketches, stubborn demos, culturally specific models, cafés made for photographs, and the precision of letterpress printing occupied this week's discussion.

FCAT's Will Reed interviewed me about imagination, Design Fiction as archaeology of the future, the role of artists alongside engineers, and how a clock radio or teaspoon can make an unfamiliar technology easier to picture.

Dré brought experiments in Blender, Resolve, and Unreal; Pawel shared games with distinctive mechanics and emotional stakes; and the discussion of wearable cameras returned repeatedly to the people being recorded.

I found an old interview in The Atlantic and brought Corner Convenience back into view. A few aisles of everyday articles of convenience offer a way to examine a culture's hopes, fears, dreams, and desires.

Generative AI’s patterns and metaphors led into tacit expertise, pathology systems, futures artifacts, and the place of workshops inside a larger creative practice.

Looking back at Design Engaged 2008 in Montréal: the imaginative force of a gathering whose participants supported one another’s live projects, and what a sustaining version might require today. I remember sharing my early take on Design Fiction in a half-baked deck with squiggles in it, and it was received and encouraged. I remember Timo Arnall nodding earnest approval; that image has stuck with me since then. I didn't realize how much I needed that, feeling a bit like an outsider in this tribe.

A partial and incomplete catalog of websites as art from back when websites could be art, curated and harvested from Sean Bonner. This archive is the kind of thing that should be preserved somehow.

Sascha Pohflepp's The Golden Institute imagines an alternate history of renewable energy, technological ambition, and the futures that follow from a different political past.