I recently gave an interview for Futures Thinking: Using a Multidisciplinary Approach. I talk about the possibilities of futures work, the value of stories and future artefacts, the bewildering arrival of large language models, and the social practice of imagining alongside other people. I've included the book description from the back cover for context.

Office Hours N°318 was a conversation about speculative work inside institutions, AI-assisted making, image bias, and the future of books. One of your better questions is: who gets to shape the future, and who gets to describe it? The conversation examined the tension between long-range speculative work and institutions shaped by short-term pressures, legal boundaries, and ownership agreements. Fiction and other made artifacts can give difficult futures a form people can examine without turning a scenario into a prediction. AI can help with drafting and iteration, while human judgment, revision, disclosure, and accessibility remain central to the work. Generated images carry assumptions about race, gender, and identity. Books can be living objects. Tools, notation, and visual representations can widen access to difficult knowledge. The conversation returned to a question that runs through much futures work: who gets to shape the future, and who gets to describe it?

Office Hours N°317 was a live test of Shreya and Sneha's Design Fiction ideation workshop. Participants imagined a 2045 school after twenty years in which AI had made productive struggle optional, then designed objects, rituals, and social arrangements from that future.

Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°316 stayed with speculative ideas about AI exposure, synthetic care, autonomous artists, machine intelligence, finite resources, internal model committees, and anxiety-sensing shoes.

Episode 105 of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast — a conversation with Ian Bogost about his new book “The Small Stuff” getting into sensory life, normal, ordinary, everyday objects, curiosity, gratification, and the recurring embodied encounters that make up the texture of a life. Read this and help see boring as worthy of your lingering.

Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°315 moved from DIY publishing and AI-assisted books through print-on-demand, independent bookselling, cooperative labor, prison abolition, and a Dallas futures workshop built from artifacts, role-play, and full contact pretend.

Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°314 centered on Graeme Reid's RCA Design Futures project After Sterility: Negotiations with the Microbial Home, then moved through cleaning culture, microbial diversity, care, verification anxiety, patina, rewilding, probiotic surfaces, and the politics of domestic hygiene.

Join The Seminar for Near Future Lab - Futuring 2.0 on Saturday, June 27, 2026. Dr. Julian Bleecker and Dr. Becky Vartabedian will join Rick and Seminar attendees for short lectures, critical theory, philosophy, history, group discussion, beverages, snacks, and an adventure of very strange proportions.