A week or two back, I was talking with a young musician wondering what it means to make music now, in the age of AI. They paused mid-sentence, sort of rolling around some notes it seemed they had prepared pre-call. I thought maybe they were waiting for some insight, or just for someone like me to make sense of the noise and confusion that surrounded their sense of their own future as a creative artist. What followed was an extemporaneous story about a design fiction project involving a box of artifacts (that felt as if they had come) from the 1980s that served as a "record album" in a non-traditional format. What I think I intended was for this tale to highlight the importance of refusing default containers and embracing audacity in creative expression. Later that week, I saw Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, a film that challenges traditional narrative structures and invites viewers to experience it as a...

In this episode my friend Tom Guarriello joins me to unpack a deceptively simple question—why do some things matter more than others? How is it that “brands” are rarely just products. Tom describes how they’re meaning-machines: coffee cups, clothes, grocery aisles, and the everyday objects we carry through life are the things that quietly scaffold identity, aspiration, and sense of belonging. Choice arrives instantly; explanation comes later. Tom’s “meaning stack” helps us understand the rise of culture brands those brands that don’t just sell products, but stage worlds: concerts, exhibitions, lifestyles, and point-of-view. We discuss Tom's new book which gets into all of this and more. Check it out: ”The Meaning of Branded Objects” available now.

Annual studio reviews with several students from Liam Young's Entertainment & Media studio at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. I had a great time sitting with students, discussing their work, and providing feedback on their projects. The creativity and innovation displayed by the students were such that it kinda made me want to join in — and reminded me of the vibrancy that one feels sitting in a studio type environment, although Sartre did say that “hell is other people” imagining a resonance of action, activity, sharing, creativity and even the occasional micro-antagonism had me feeling back to such times. Or maybe I am wondering about the feelings I have working solo in the studio here. In any case, it was inspiring to see how they are exploring the perimeters and boundaries of design, technology and a kind of storytelling in the context of entertainment and media. Good stuff. Always an easy “yes” when Liam invites me over.

Organizations often ask people with a generalist, orienting sensibility to behave like delivery specialists — and then interpret the resulting friction as a personal or performance problem. The essay that went out in the email newsletter last week (and appeared as well on the other various endpoints like Substack, Patreon, and LinkedIn) generated a good amount of reader mail. The questions were less about the theme of “misalignment” and more about the undergirding principles of the specialists and the generalist, and how their various approaches, ways of working, deliverables and — overall — ontologies can be distinguised and the consequences of these differences to organizations. Now, I recognize that these are somewhat broad schematic categories and that in practice, people are more complex and nuanced than these labels suggest. Still, I think there is value in clarifying the differences in order to better understand how they can collaborate effectively. Some of this comes from the confusion I had several years...

Calling all generalists! Time to collaborate with specialists so we can all navigate into more habitable futures together! A decade and a half of identical headlines warning that “the university as we know it” is over tells you everything about the misalignment between specialized institutions and the futures they’re supposed to deliver. The failure of the university is a microcosm of the failure of any large, siloed organization. Over-specialization creates blind spots. Those blind spots make the organization brittle, unable to adapt, and ultimately unable to articulate a preferred future. The role of the generalist is to re-stitch the connective tissue the structure no longer allows.

The Future of Being Human: An HCI Symposium at MBZUAI was a gathering of researchers, artists, designers, and academics exploring the intersection of technology and humanity. Wondering and wandering into futures together in order to actively build a more human future, considering themes of AI and agency, embodiment and identity, ethics and values, and the role of design in shaping what it means to be human in a world increasingly mediated by technology.

I’ve been wondering lately if we’ve let the word capitalist calcify into something too blunt to be useful. Somewhere along the way it became shorthand for extraction, exploitation, and the hollowing out of meaning. Fair enough — those systems exist, and they do real harm. But when I look at my own life, the word attaches itself in ways that feel quieter, more human, and frankly more honest.

A short sketch of an essay that came out of some workshops and discussion about the role of generative AI in image production, trying to collapse the theoretical into and onto the practice of making images today. What I am trying to get at is that Hal Foster's *The Anti-Aesthetic* (1983) feels newly relevant in a world where generative AI produces smooth, finished images at industrial scale. The anti-aesthetic then was about resisting spectacle and surface; today it might be about reclaiming the interval of thinking and intention that generation threatens to erase. Of course, I'm not referring to all generative AI art here, but rather the kind that is produced and consumed unthinkingly, as a kind of visual fast food — all the anime, the portraits, the endless style transfers, the goof-ball “slop”, and so on that floods social media feeds, and that risks numbing our capacity to see and think critically about images.

I’ll be joining the Dubai Future Forum 2025 — the world’s largest gathering of futurists, policymakers, and creative thinkers — to speak on a panel titled “Relearning Imagination: Are We Actively Shaping Our Future?” In this session, we'll be discussing why imagination is not a luxury or a side activity, but a strategic capability we urgently need to develop. Drawing from my work here at Near Future Laboratory, I’ll mention how I help organizations and communities build their own imagination practices — using Design Fiction, storytelling, and tangible prototypes to make possibility feel real and actionable. This conversation brings together leaders from government, design, and culture to consider how we can reclaim agency, expand our sense of what’s possible, and shape futures worth wanting.