Office Hours N°311 happened on May 29, 2026 at 0900 California time (UTC-7).

Denver opened the session as a field note: old theaters, print-shop machinery, a Lyons farm, and 26-year-old mead. It was a reminder that futures work often starts with particular objects and the people who keep those objects alive. The aside about Grolsch-style bottles pointed to the useful little flip-top explainer in the chat.

Alex Bernatzky shared Neurospicy Futures of Work, a participatory speculative design project asking what future workplaces might look like when designed with and for neurodivergent people, especially people with ADHD.

The main map used time and agency to describe four modes: Blurry Bites, Sticky Gelatin, Sparkling Flux, and Expanding Fiber. The useful point was that these are movable states rather than fixed identities. People drift around the map depending on sleep, food, medication, notifications, deadlines, and the friction of a given day.

The food metaphor worked because it moved the project into taste, texture, packaging, ritual, and appetite. The strongest suggestion was to make the metaphor material: chips, jelly babies, sourdough, sports drinks, ingredient labels, bus shelter ads, or a strange pharma-meets-Red Bull commercial.

The group also pushed back on foresight’s default furniture: 2x2s, cones, decks, and scenario descriptions. Alex wanted the project to become an invitation to play again, and it was headed toward Festival der Zukunft 2026 in Munich.

The sharper edge was the familiar “ADHD as superpower” claim. Divergent minds can connect things other people miss, yet that framing can turn into another form of extraction when institutions treat neurodivergence as a hiring fad. The better provocation was a job description that requires neurodivergence because the organization genuinely needs minds comfortable wandering away from the expected path.

Watch Office Hours N°311 on YouTube

p.s. I created an artifact in the form of a role titled Senior VP Divergence Research Systems, imagining a near future in which organizations have a function devoted to noticing, investigating, and prototyping unfamiliar possibilities as AI absorbs more routine support work. The artifact is available for inspection at The Adjacency.