Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°318 happened on July 31, 2026. There will not be a playback from this session, so here are a few of the more topical emanations and insights discussed.
-
The conversation examined the tension between long-range speculative work and institutions shaped by short-term pressures, legal boundaries, and ownership agreements. What can be imagined, written, or shared changes when work moves between an organization and an independent practice.
-
Fiction and other made artifacts can give difficult futures a form people can examine without turning a scenario into a prediction. Automation, regulation, infrastructure, public systems, and social change became questions with textures, behaviors, and surrounding worlds.
-
AI can help with drafting and iteration, while human judgment, revision, disclosure, and accessibility remain central to the work. The useful question is often less whether a machine was involved than how much care was applied to what came after its first output.
-
Generated images carry assumptions about race, gender, and identity. The discussion considered the creative possibilities of abstraction, obscured faces, and leaving some identities unassigned rather than forcing them into view.
-
Books can be living objects. Print, digital editions, serialized updates, and interactive layers each offer different ways for a work to change, accumulate context, and remain available to readers.
-
Tools, notation, and visual representations can widen access to difficult knowledge. A good interface can reveal relationships that remain hidden inside an expert vocabulary or a fixed sequence of instruction.
-
The conversation returned to a question that runs through much futures work: who gets to shape the future, and who gets to describe it?
Office Hours are part of the Near Future Laboratory Paid Patreon and Substack subscribers. If you want to join the conversation, you can subscribe on Substack or support the work on Patreon.
It’s only $10/month ($2.50/week for 90 minute sessions) or $25/month for professional members — and includes access to the community, weekly Office Hours, and the Discord community.