What if a 12% surge told us more about our future thinking than about our infrastructure?
Today’s Design Fiction Dispatch came to me after General Seminar S07/E02, which focused on agentic AI. The Dispatch surfaces something that goes into the category of strange but familiar: suppose there was a spike in global inference demand. How does it reveal the inevitable brittle systems and infrastructure, like when it rains in Venice and the internet goes down. And then wondering why or what would suddenly demand an unexpected large surge in inference — and what that surge would reveal about the invisible supply chains of compute, data, and human attention that underpin our AI-driven world.
This Dispatch isn’t just a clever speculative near future news story.
I see these things as strategy artifacts — they are like near‑future projections that collapse and decompile the instrumented trend lines we already see today into a lived, felt experience of systemic fragility and emergent sensor layers. These strategy artifacts invite us to sit with the ambiguity of why things happen, not just how to fix them.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — what Design Fiction does best is to take weak signals and makes them tangible and felt; it gives teams and leaders a felt future to interrogate, wander around in, prototype; it collapses abstractions like reports and analysis into something you can argue with, laugh at, or get uncomfortable alongside.
In a time when infrastructure debates often circle cost curves, chip scarcity, data centre scaling, and algorithmic performance, this dispatch reframes the strategic question: What happens when the invisible supply chains of inference become brittle, or poorly managed or unexpectedly stressed?
We can’t predict the precise shape of tomorrow’s compute bottlenecks — but we can train our teams to notice the traces, the chatter, the failures that matter before they become headlines.
And maybe that’s the point: Design Fiction doesn’t forecast. It foregrounds.
What weak signal are you overlooking today?
Got signals you need to make sense of? Want to explore the implications of those signals in a way that’s tangible and felt? Let’s talk about how we can use Design Fiction to create strategy artifacts that help you and your teams interrogate the ambiguity of why things happen, not just how to fix them.