Weekly Office Hours are held every Friday at 9am PST / 5pm UTC. Sign up for the newsletter to get notified so you can join us for open discussion on design fiction, speculative design, critical futures, and near future laboratory projects. This week we covered various topics including project updates, community engagement, and upcoming events.

Last week we discussed "own your stack" strategies, self-hosted tools, privacy practices, and web preservation techniques. We also explored creative workflows like personal typeface creation and planned a June Denver “f/unconference” festival focused on software for personal practices, tiny projects, letterpress and typesetting — and more!

In this episode of General Seminar, we explore the intersection of strategy and science fiction. Strategy is often seen as a data-driven discipline, but at its core, it is about envisioning and acting upon imagined futures. Design Fiction serves as a powerful tool to make these futures tangible, allowing organizations to "feel into" possibilities long before they can be measured. This episode gets into how Design Fiction can help surface implicit assumptions in strategic planning and foster more generative discussions about the future.

This is the afterword I wrote for Giovanni Caruso and Silvio Cioni's compilation of futures writings “The Field Guide to Design Futures” in which I argue that futures work shouldn’t be over‑disciplined. I start with children at play and the John Carpenter film “They Live” (1988) to show how imagination and the courage to see differently matter more than labels or methods. The book, I suggest, is a field guide of fragments — an archaeological journal that asks readers to connect the shards of approaches, techniques, methods, intuitions themselves. My call is to reclaim improvisation, resist professional posturing, and practice the kind of meaning‑making that can carry new possibilities across the horizon.

Office Hours N°294 explored design fiction for AI ethics, meeting facilitation, and organizational culture. Highlights included Sean Park’s university GenAI fictions, practical frameworks for future scenarios, debates on human vs AI creativity, critical chatbot defaults, and the ethics of alignment and control. The session emphasized the importance of provenance, governance, and adapting tools to diverse cultures and values.

Office Hours N°293 recap and highlights: ai interaction atlas, diagram choice as strategy, hierarchy visualization, emergent pattern languages, triz for invention, portable curriculum with card decks, enterprise ai reality check, hyper-drop festival metaphor, physical on-ramping into digital, futures as ethics practice, prototypes as real options, unconference energy template.

Highlights from Office Hours N°291 (Dec 26, 2025): on media containers, blind-box “Super Drops,” shipping as design constraint, ethical scaling, breadcrumb publishing, and a graph mindset for curating culture.

General Seminar S07 E01 After Action Report: Key takeaways from our exploration of the AI 2027 Summary report through a "janky time machine archeology" exercise using TrendPacks to create tangible artifacts embodying everyday realities of an AI-integrated future.

We found all kinds of interesting artifacts that shed light on how AI might be woven into daily life by 2027, from neighborhood food-network fridges to prompt starter packs for civic engagement.

It was also a great opportunity to try out the Trend Pack Workbook as a structure for grounding our imagination in the what-could-be and what-ifs of near-future AI scenarios.

The newspaper from the future is a way to create a tangible vision of a world as a kind of preparation for navigating multiple simultaneous ontologies that orbit around one's own world. As anachronistic as newspapers may seem, they provide a familiar container for the cacophony of perspectives and points-of-view that make up our daily experience. Why I cannot completely convince those who are more screen or digitally oriented as to this approach, I find translating overwhelming insights from various sources into a single, imaginative container to be quite satisfying. Plus, I have newsprint in my blood — my dad was a newspaperman. He'd take us to the printer — which used to be right there in Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan. I remember the distinct smell of the ink, the linotype machines and whatever they were doing (I would not find out until decades later about what they were doing when the printer feller would make a metal stamp with my...

General Seminar is Back! Check this out: That AI Futures Model from the AI 2027 project? Well..yeah..it’s back too! And it’s got predictions..and it’s got some issues. In this episode of General Seminar, we dig into the assumptions behind the model — but we're not going to pontificate about AI timelines. Instead, we’ll explore how to think critically about such models and their implications for our understanding of AI's future. Join us as we unpack the nuances of AI forecasting and discuss what it means for technologists, policymakers, and society at large. But here at General Seminar we actually get super tangible. Rather than arguing whats real, what's hype, and what’s WTF..we imagine into the near future of AI by conjuring the scenarios, experiences, and artifacts we might find there.