Week 44 of 2025 wrestles with the tension between frameworks and imagination. Julian reflects on rediscovering an old student video of the Work Kit of Design Fiction and what it reveals about creativity without rigid structure. He argues that frameworks often narrow our view and dull our sensitivity to emergence, while open-ended play strengthens our ability to navigate ambiguity. This issue expands the theme through Fewer Frameworks. More Fragments. — a piece about using tangible fragments instead of...

This week’s *Midweek Dispatch* dives into the strange, plausible near future of AI companionship. Through the story of a “Friend” pendant that testifies against its owner, the issue explores what happens when our devices stop being neutral tools and start behaving like emotional participants in our lives. The intro reflects on the role of Design Fiction as a way to think through these futures—not through panic or policy, but by making them tangible, relatable, and a little absurd.

This issue asks what AI and poetry have to do with one another—and argues that poetry’s non-rational sense-making is exactly what’s needed to explore unfamiliar technological terrain. It threads together Matt Webb’s Poem/1 clock, the Poetry Camera, and my own Poem/OS to propose an “expeditionary” approach to innovation that privileges playful prototypes over incrementalism. It spotlights a feature on Sascha Pohflepp’s Blind Camera, announces a Meshtastic off-grid radio group build in the Discord, revisits the Work Kit of...

Midweek dispatch: a final nudge to join today’s LinkedIn Live on “Operationalizing Imagination” (with Damien Newman, Brad Topliff, and Howard B. Esbin, PhD), plus a community side-project to build a Meshtastic LoRa mesh, a studio note on Ghostwriter’s Vibewriter experiment (LLM-driven cyberpunk writing, locally), a shout to Scott Paterson’s Field Report, Bruce Sterling’s Roman multitool reconstruction, and an open invite to the Near Future Laboratory Discord/Patreon and weekly Office Hours. Also: a classic blog pull, “The Internet Used...

In this reflection from the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, Julian Bleecker revisits Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodern architecture as a metaphor for disorientation and “systemic subjectlessness.” Wandering through the building’s mirrored corridors, he connects Jameson’s insights to our present digital labyrinths — the invisible architectures of data, algorithms, and AI that now shape our perception and agency. What once was a physical loss of orientation has become a cognitive and existential one, mediated by code and platforms....

How can speculative design can make imagination tangible within organizations. Through Hala Auf’s thesis on Object-Oriented Ontology — viewing objects as cultural verbs rather than inert things — the newsletter reflects on how design shapes meaning and community. Julian Bleecker connects this to his experience building OMATA and proposes an R&D for culture, where “functional fictions” and rapid prototypes help teams explore and define futures before they arrive. The piece closes with whimsical notes on “Largely Languid Models”...