Office Hours N°309 began with Peter's analog proof-of-humanity intervention at the beach, then moved through trust, AI avatars, surveillance, locality, embodied social experience, reciprocity, education, and Rick's phrase "the frequency of compassion."

I'll be participating A special Denver premiere screening of Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions on May 29, 2026 at the MCA Denver Holiday Theater, presented by Biennial of the Americas, MATTER, MCA Denver, and Sundance Film Festival.

A Design Fiction Dispatch about agentic appliances, intelligent home systems, and the service economy that appears when everyday autonomy needs repair, realignment, emotional labor, liability models, and practical maintenance.

Notes from an EPIC People Learning Week conversation I had with Jay Hasbrouck on organizational imagination where we wondered — how companies can keep enough imaginative range to notice unfamiliar possibilities, how speculative artifacts and ethnographic thinking can make those possibilities discussable, and why AI should be treated as more than an efficiency machine.

A Design Fiction Dispatch about AI-Standard Farming, Heritage Produce, and the artifacts that let us spot weak signals from today as they settle into tomorrow's institutions, certifications, jobs, rituals, compromises, and operating models.

The signals of autonomous agentic businesses and the prevalance of those autonomous food delivery boxes collide in a world in which self-directed food trucks start to go into business for “themselves.” In this speculative prototype, research points to agentic platforms appearing that choose menus, routes, and run social promotions without human oversight. This is a research practice called speculative or anticipatory research. It is a way to explore the implications of emerging phenomena, weak signals, and vague trends by creating plausible scenarios that can be examined in more detail. While it may look like science fiction, it is actually a form of research that helps us understand the potential impacts of new technologies and social changes before they become fully realized. This feature is a speculative prototype: a plausible news article from a near future where autonomous agentic systems have moved from assisting small businesses to behaving like businesses themselves. It is grounded in signals already visible around AI agents,...

Why do organizations lose the capacity to imagine and recognize unfamiliar possibilities? How we can regain this essential ingredient of innovation? There is a delicate balance between imagination and structure/ Different kinds of thinking lead to actionable insights inside organizations, while some kinds of thinking tend to make the ground for expansive creativity and innovation less fertile than it might otherwise be. How can researchers, designers, strategists, and engineers make room for unfamiliar possibilities inside systems dominated by speed, tooling, and orthodoxy? We're seeing how the tools for building and testing ideas have never been faster — or more sometimes more constraining. When innovation pipelines are optimized for speed and polish, organizations can quietly lose their capacity to notice and act on genuinely unfamiliar possibilities. In this session, Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory) is joined by Jay Hasbrouck (Google) to explore why imaginative range atrophies and what it takes to recover it.

Another Design Fiction Dispatch where we explore the implications of equitable access to high-quality large language models (LLMs) and the emerging debates around technological equity, rights, and the potential for a new digital divide.

We went to a future in which the “constitutions” that have been mysteriously decanted into the LLMs used throughout everyday life are now seen through the policies and regulations and doctrinal ephemera that govern their behavior and influence their interactions with and amonst us throughout our identies, cultures, societies, communities and normal, ordinary, everyday life. From the profound to the pedestrian and mundane, the effervescence of these doctrines called (perhaps wrongly) “constitutions” can be found in the form and shape of things like street signs, grocery store receipts, and other everyday artifacts that subtly encode the rules and norms by which these intelligent systems operate.