Previously, in Office Hours..
1/ We started with a delightfully petty but real point: type still matters — ligatures, kerning, captions, and all the micro-choices that keep “the future” from looking like a ransom note.
2/ A provocation landed hard: if voice becomes the default interface, do we drift into a post-literature society — and what do we lose (or weirdly regain) in memory, attention, and agency when “reading” gets replaced by listening?
3/ The “Lab for Radical Museum Futures” showed a practical move: take a design fiction kit and tune it to a sector by swapping in its native voices and values (plain language, academic, journalistic, children’s museum, care/collaboration). Lab for Radical Museum Futures (a futures lab for museum workers to reimagine museums).
4/ We kicked around the idea of “exhibit-ising” anything — turning content into an immersive, walk-around experience — with a live reference: a VR re-presentation of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ kinetic text world. VR re-presentation (immersive kinetic type based on YHCHI), plus the source work LOTUS BLOSSOM (M+ collection note on the Flash-era piece).
5/ A recurring vibe: “dream logic” as a useful lens — not as mysticism, but as a way to let associative jumps do sensemaking work, turning artifacts into a kind of navigable “complexity wall.”
6/ We named the psychological edge case too: extended assistant immersion can tip into obsessive loops, delusional reinforcement, or just plain cognitive overheating — the “go outside and touch snow” moment. AI psychosis (Psychology Today on chatbots amplifying delusional beliefs).
7/ The conversation widened into writing: AI-authored (or AI-co-written) books aren’t the end of writing, but they do force a new argument about craft, ownership, and what “authorship” even means after tools become collaborators. Sympathy Tower Tokyo (publisher page for Rie Qudan’s novel) and NYT on AI romance books (gift/unlocked link about Claude + rapid romance production).
8/ We pulled in adjacent references that sharpen the frame: Track Changes (a literary history of word processing), and Borges’ “Pierre Menard” as the canonical mind-bender about identical text becoming a different work when context shifts. Pierre Menard (PDF/ (public-domain scan).
9/ We touched concrete poetry and “reinforced concrete poetry” as a name for the moment: constraints + machinery producing new forms, not just new content, with Claude artifacts as a shareable medium. Claude concrete poem artifact (public Claude artifact) and What are Artifacts? (Claude support explainer).
10/ The “museum/experience” thread got concrete via exemplars: Local Projects (experience + exhibition design studio), Daily tous les jours (collective interactive experiences for public space), and teamLab (immersive digital art environments) — all case studies for what it looks like when information becomes a place you can inhabit.
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