Office Hours N°317

Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°317 happened on July 24, 2026 at 0900 California time (UTC-7).

This session used the project-share mode of Office Hours to test a workshop structure that Shreya and Sneha have been developing. The subject was education after twenty years of AI-assisted learning, with a central question: what does school look like when productive struggle has been optional for 20 years?

The run-of-show placed participants inside a 2045 high-school scenario and sent small groups into a time-machine exercise. Each group had to retrieve one pocket-sized object from the future school, describe where it was found, and explain the rituals and social conditions around it.

Shreya and Sneha used the Office Hours project-share mode to test a Design Fiction ideation workshop about education after twenty years of AI-assisted learning. Its central question was: “What does school look like when productive struggle has been optional for 20 years?”
The run-of-show introduced productive struggle, placed participants in a 2045 high-school scenario, and sent small groups into a time-machine exercise. Each group had to retrieve one pocket-sized object from the future school, describe where it was found, and explain the rituals and social conditions around it.
One group imagined a pirate-reality channel in which students use UV graffiti, hidden access codes, and private audio-visual overlays to create subcultures inside a homogenized AI education system. The object opened a discussion about belonging, clandestine study groups, curiosity, and social learning.

Another group proposed the “Illustrious,” a haptic brush that helps students recover patience, muscle memory, and individual expression in a world where AI supplies most answers. The brush became a way to discuss analog texture, practicing another artist’s process, and art as a form of self-expression.

A third group imagined a future sports room where students control repaired and upcycled robots in football matches. The scenario connected learning by doing with questions about physicality, hand-eye coordination, robot repair, frugal invention, and the distance between a student’s body and the machines they operate.
A fourth artifact, “Membrane,” was a sweat-sensing headband found in a school gym. It measured physical exertion as a proxy for effort and learning, opening a contrast between bodily struggle, mental effort, and future interfaces that require more physical expression.
The group found that the object was a useful anchor, while the richest discussion often concerned its surrounding ecosystem: curriculum, rituals, peer groups, teachers, infrastructure, and the larger society. Pawel Halicki’s Marble curriculum map gave that question a practical reference point by showing how school subjects connect across a larger learning system.
The debrief identified a tension in the activity sheet. A form can free participants from wondering what to produce, while naming and filling it in too early can shift attention toward compliance or product development. Softer prompts such as “the future you want to inhabit” or a fondly remembered school experience may provide better rails.
Participants suggested a second stage after the initial object-making: remix the groups and ask what lessons, exercises, skills, school structures, and social arrangements the artifacts imply. A third act could backcast from those futures to present-day experiments, including materials teachers could run in their own districts.
The test established prototypes as communication devices rather than finished answers. A brush, headband, secret channel, or robot controller made an imagined educational system available for shared examination, while the follow-up discussion supplied revisions to the workshop structure and its possible SXSW EDU proposal.

The session left the workshop with a useful set of artifacts, a clearer sense of how the time-machine exercise works, and several revisions to the run-of-show. The project-share format gave Shreya and Sneha a live group in which to test the activity, notice where the prompts opened imagination, and examine where the structure began to feel like a form to complete.

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