Episode 104 is with Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow, two artists whose work sits in the thick of media art, public imagination, climate, systems thinking, and the human/non-human tangle. The center of the episode is More&More, the speculative card-deck and facilitation framework Sarah and Marina have been developing since 2016. It is worldbuilding by way of constraint: pick six strange cards, accept that they are true, inhabit the consequences, take on a role, make an artifact, and then look back at the present from the world you just made. We get into default dystopia, holidays as a way to understand a world's values, systems thinking, abolitionist workshops, traumatized communities, rigid institutional groups, and the material realities of AI systems.

How will the choices we make today shape who we become tomorrow? In the next session of Dubai Future Horizons, designer and researcher Julian Bleecker, Ph.D. joins Professor John E. Katsos for a conversation on identity, ethics, resilience, and the human capabilities we will need to navigate the futures we are creating.

Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°313 became a useful tour through vibe coding as personal software craft: Eric's terpene-and-cannabinoid weed app, strain drift, code hygiene for AI-assisted development, the Robot Oil multi-agent system, Drew's frame for models, harnesses, MCPs, and skills, and the practical importance of managing context carefully.

This edition features a collection of insights and resources focused on the future, including a quote from Ken Anderson about living alongside imperfect systems. It highlights a library entry on forecasting methods by Janice J. Tait, a workshop on futuring in Denver, and the Geneva Street Map project that navigates autonomous vehicle integration in urban environments. The newsletter also introduces a color palette tool, discusses personal tooling inspired by Ken Anderson's observations, and revisits the Applied Intelligence Issue 001, a design fiction newspaper exploring AI's integration into daily life. Additionally, it covers Office Hours discussions on accessibility, typography, and the dynamics of belief and reparative justice in design practices.

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.

Office Hours N°312 moved through accessibility and adaptive interfaces, Kristian Bjornard's type-design inquiry into future-facing typography, visual languages, belief and power, reparative justice, small interventions inside systems, hustle, abundance, and generosity.

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°311 moved from Denver field notes into Alex Bernatzky's Neurospicy Futures of Work project, a participatory speculative design inquiry into workplaces designed with and for neurodivergent people, especially people with ADHD.

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.