This is the afterword I wrote for Giovanni Caruso and Silvio Cioni's compilation of futures writings “The Field Guide to Design Futures” in which I argue that futures work shouldn’t be over‑disciplined. I start with children at play and the John Carpenter film “They Live” (1988) to show how imagination and the courage to see differently matter more than labels or methods. The book, I suggest, is a field guide of fragments — an archaeological journal that asks readers to connect the shards of approaches, techniques, methods, intuitions themselves. My call is to reclaim improvisation, resist professional posturing, and practice the kind of meaning‑making that can carry new possibilities across the horizon.

Office Hours N°294 explored design fiction for AI ethics, meeting facilitation, and organizational culture. Highlights included Sean Park’s university GenAI fictions, practical frameworks for future scenarios, debates on human vs AI creativity, critical chatbot defaults, and the ethics of alignment and control. The session emphasized the importance of provenance, governance, and adapting tools to diverse cultures and values.

Office Hours N°293 recap and highlights: ai interaction atlas, diagram choice as strategy, hierarchy visualization, emergent pattern languages, triz for invention, portable curriculum with card decks, enterprise ai reality check, hyper-drop festival metaphor, physical on-ramping into digital, futures as ethics practice, prototypes as real options, unconference energy template.

Highlights from Office Hours N°291 (Dec 26, 2025): on media containers, blind-box “Super Drops,” shipping as design constraint, ethical scaling, breadcrumb publishing, and a graph mindset for curating culture.

General Seminar S07 E01 After Action Report: Key takeaways from our exploration of the AI 2027 Summary report through a "janky time machine archeology" exercise using TrendPacks to create tangible artifacts embodying everyday realities of an AI-integrated future.

We found all kinds of interesting artifacts that shed light on how AI might be woven into daily life by 2027, from neighborhood food-network fridges to prompt starter packs for civic engagement.

It was also a great opportunity to try out the Trend Pack Workbook as a structure for grounding our imagination in the what-could-be and what-ifs of near-future AI scenarios.

The newspaper from the future is a way to create a tangible vision of a world as a kind of preparation for navigating multiple simultaneous ontologies that orbit around one's own world. As anachronistic as newspapers may seem, they provide a familiar container for the cacophony of perspectives and points-of-view that make up our daily experience. Why I cannot completely convince those who are more screen or digitally oriented as to this approach, I find translating overwhelming insights from various sources into a single, imaginative container to be quite satisfying. Plus, I have newsprint in my blood — my dad was a newspaperman. He'd take us to the printer — which used to be right there in Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan. I remember the distinct smell of the ink, the linotype machines and whatever they were doing (I would not find out until decades later about what they were doing when the printer feller would make a metal stamp with my...

General Seminar is Back! Check this out: That AI Futures Model from the AI 2027 project? Well..yeah..it’s back too! And it’s got predictions..and it’s got some issues. In this episode of General Seminar, we dig into the assumptions behind the model — but we're not going to pontificate about AI timelines. Instead, we’ll explore how to think critically about such models and their implications for our understanding of AI's future. Join us as we unpack the nuances of AI forecasting and discuss what it means for technologists, policymakers, and society at large. But here at General Seminar we actually get super tangible. Rather than arguing whats real, what's hype, and what’s WTF..we imagine into the near future of AI by conjuring the scenarios, experiences, and artifacts we might find there.

The Slow Messenger project by the Near Future Laboratory explores the concept of delayed communication in an era dominated by instant messaging. By delivering messages one character at a time, it challenges our perceptions of immediacy and encourages reflection on patience and anticipation in our interactions. What I was trying to explore with this project was the idea that slowing down communication could lead to a deeper appreciation of the message itself. In a world where we are accustomed to instant responses, the Slow Messenger invites us to reconsider the value of waiting and the anticipation that comes with it. Alot of work for a bit of a joke; this goes into the category of "theory object" — a thing that you must make and perhaps, like writing can be a way of thinking by going through a bit of a struggle to get the thinking turned into writing, building a thing can be a way of thinking through an idea. In...

Digging around in the archives, I found this project from 2004 called MobileSCOUT. It was a public art project that collected audio narratives of local surroundings, personal rituals, and public sightings using mobile phones. Participants could leave voice messages describing the flora, fauna, or behaviors they observed in their environment, creating a collective audio tapestry of everyday life.

Developed in collaboration with my PDPal friends Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow, MobileSCOUT leveraged VXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language) to create a voice-based application that allowed users to interact with the system through voice commands and touch-tone inputs.

This project was an early exploration of using mobile phones as tools for public art and storytelling, predating the smartphone era and the widespread concept of mobile apps. It was an experiment in utilizing the technology available at the time to create a collective audio tapestry of everyday life.