In this edition of Office Hours Side Projects Edition, we explore the intersection of AI, speculative storytelling, and embodied design. Sandro presents his work on composable documents that regenerate based on user interaction, while Rodney shares a poetic series of “911 call transcripts” from decommissioned cyborgs. Both talks invite us to rethink the tools we use and the stories we tell.

The problem with optimization? It can become an obsession. We can easily optimize to the point of failure — and not even realize it. We want things to be faster, smoother, more efficient. But in all that streamlining, we risk losing something essential — a very particular kind of Creativity.

Ghostwriter is a speculative functional prototype that is meant to explore the possibilities of a more collaborative and conversational interaction with AI. It is not a product, but rather a design fiction that imagines how we might work — or in this case, write — with AI in the near future. This is a kidn of UX mode that I'm calling Streaming Completion that felt quite like a different kind of interaction with a collaborating intelligence: rather than asking it stuff, it waits for you to pause for awhile and then offers some completion suggestions. A bit like traditional autocomplete but entire sentences or even more can be configured. I wanted to see what this would feel like, especially with the ability to consume context from a corpus my own documents, blog posts, and other writing. The idea is that the AI can suggest completions that are relevant to my own work, which might help me to think about what I'm working...

A conversation with Steve Fisher that gets into my personal history with futures, design, science-fiction, engineering and how all of that led to instantiating design fiction as a practice. We talk about the artifacts of imagination, how we can use design fiction to think about the future, and how we can create a more imaginative future. We get into the importance of imagination as an evolutionary advantage and how we can exercise our imaginative muscles to navigate the rapidly changing world we live in. I also share some early days experiences with technology, building my first computer and why that was so important to me. It was a Xerox 820 — a popular single board computer that you could find at amateur radio fairs and the like. You'd have to find a case, get a power supply, all the cables and find a monitor and disk drive (8-inch floppy drive!) to make it work. It was fun to build and finally...

In my book ‘It's time to imagine harder’, my hypothesis was that bringing the creative consciousness back to work is a clear path to unlocking the unexpected and unanticipated, the unseen. The creative consciousness - which has a proclivity or impulse to operate comfortably even enthusiastically with the unknown — can breath in the warm oceans of ambiguity. The creative consciouness ambles around in the new territories and terrains for which the old ways of knowing and being do not fit — they are not big enough to make sense of the territory. They are old. The new is new. The creative consciousness is the thing that fosters the accidental discoveries, and that fosters unintended breakthroughs that challenge conventional boundaries. The creative consciousness is a catalyst for organic evolution within any effort for which uncertainty looms large. When we embrace uncertainty, we open that new terrain, providing avenues for originality that rigid idation frameworks often obscure. This episode of the podcast gets into...

Wow. That felt really alive. Elysia, Emily, Rahmin and I hosted a workshop last Friday. It was one of several workshops at San Francisco Design Week. The context was to consider the obvious but easily repressed fact: we are all aging. Every day. Is longevity about living longer? About finding the way to extend biological life? Suppose it is not about length of life so much as fullness of purpose? What happens if we make aging about longevity rather than life extension? How does the semantic shift adjust the way we design for more purposeful lives? Can we find the way to think of aging as a continuing path towards a sense of purpose and value?

The languages and apparatuses for sense-making we have today are insufficient for the territory we are entering with AI. When those who conjured AI into existence willingly express their bewilderment at the ‘how’ of the machinic contrivances they created, we are truly at the edges of a new territory; a new land where ways of being and ways of knowing feel different. Our existing notions of self, purpose, value, ways of knowing and ways of being are insufficient for the task of making sense of this new terrain. AI stands not as a tool, but as the entry point to this new territory. Those who probe the boundaries and edges of this new territory are the vanguard of sense-making. We need to explore, experiment and prototype our way in order to make it make sense. The Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio is a sense-making lab, configured to help introduce new idioms, patterns, rituals, language and embodiments that help us...

Ghostwriter TUI is a speculative prototype for a collaborative writing experience that uses AI to suggest next sentences or paragraphs. This is an test of the UX mechanic in a terminal-based interface. This post explores the mechanics of this TUI interface and its potential for low-friction writing experiences. Vibewriter and Ghostwriter are part of my Artificial Intelligence & Designed Fictions Research Studio. This research program is open to discuss commercial support, corporate or organizational sponsors, and incubation opportunities. Our thesis is that speculative prototyping in an expansive and experimental fashion is the way to discover new opportunities for this next phase of human consciousness. We will explore new kinds of interactions, services, artifacts, and objects as if we are entering a new territory for which the old modalities and assumptions are like ancient epistemologies and ontologies ill-suited for this new land.

Notes from Office Hours Side Projects Edition N°262, where we discuss the intersection of AI, art, and technology. This session features a presentation by Andrew Cor on horizon scanning and early warning systems, followed by Kirby Ferguson's 'Dream Logic' project. The conversation gets into into the challenges and aesthetics of AI-generated content, its ethical implications, and the future of creativity.