**1**. Somewhere in Holland in the mid-17th century, a time machine was invented. Or it may have been a teleportation device. This is how it happened.

As I see it, there are two unspoken principles undergirding work to create better, more habitable near future worlds.

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The process of doing Design Fiction is one and the same as the outcomes. The Process becomes the work product, which is then preserved by itself — your finished ‘Design Fiction’.

In most instances I can think of, science fiction is more than simple dramatic storytelling about the future. It is often allegory through which the present state is refracted back to us — an assessment of who we are as...

I’ll keep things brief this week as my brain is all filled up with reading our manuscript and I already begged our lovely whip-cracker crackerjack editorial shepherds with a three day extension to final-final stuff and...

But before that, I want to mention that Nick presented [the closing keynote at the IKEA Digital Days](https://tinyurl.com/ikea-talk) conference last week from his studio in Oakland. He spoke about setting the right...

This week was a bit of a highly generative and exciting few or four days here at the Near Future Laboratory's Distributed Global Headquarters. You see, there were some diverts and distractions, the most exciting of...

There’s a wonderful Design Fictional moment, done with a kind of subtlety and incisiveness that implicates the residue of a possible episteme in which the Algorithm is the central mechanism of our relationship to the world, and to ourselves.

You'd find that moment at around 43:50 in Westworld, Season 3, Episode 01. In that moment our earnest protagonist Caleb gets a call checking in on an unlikely desk job he recently applied for. On the phone is an agent from the company. The conversation is polite and quite empathetic on the part of the agent, who is explaining that, unfortunately, it wasn’t going to work out — seems there wasn’t a good fit. 🤷🏽‍♂️