Photarium (ermah...) is one of last quarter’s tool-builds — something I cobbled in order to manage studio-sized inventories of visual assets, also known in less pedantic idiom as “images.”

I used to shove images directly into the blog’s CMS, but as the volume of images grew, that became untenable. So I built Photarium to manage them better, by making findability super easy and keeping externalizable materials, like..“externalized”.

This came from finding myself needing to wrangle hundreds of images for various projects, print productions, websites, presentations, and client work. There may in fact be a better tool for such, but I know this one and I built it to accomodate my, particular ways of working and sense-making and my visual thinking brain. Plus, I don’t want to subscribe to somethign someone else made that’s got a mark-up that I can eliminate by doing the work of building and maintaining myself. (Storage is a present consideration and the costs thereof, but relative to most this is miniscule as a cost..the breakfast burrito I just had cost nearly 2x more than my monthly image storage fees, including bandwidth and resizing, just to say..and if I had gone to Erewhon then, like..forget it..)

Some people can build their own furniture. I build my own tools. (And then get to share them.)

(Self-hosted for the everyday homesteader — or just run it locally on your own machine.)

This is the Near Future Laboratory newsletter — thanks for reading. In case you're new here and wondering -- I'm Julian Bleecker. I help leaders and strategy teams navigate uncertainty through strategic prototyping -- working backward from plausible near futures to make today's choices clearer.

I use an approach I pioneered called Design Fiction. You see some of it here in the newsletter and definitely over on my site over at Near Future Laboratory.

I create tangible artifacts and narrative experiences that turn abstract foresight into concrete strategic options, alignment, and action. My practice spans engineering (BSEE, MSEng/HCI) and the social sciences/humanities (PhD), so the work holds up technically and lands with cultural relevance and it's grounded and tangible.

Near Future Laboratory can bring decades of experience, expertise, and an extensive network of similarly talented professionals -- and I'm available for commissions, facilitated workshops, seminars, talks, embedded engagements, and leadership roles.

Reproductions? Film props? Museum artifacts? Cosplayer’s everyday carry?

The modern 'Every Day Carry' craze has roots stretching back to prehistory, when humans lugged special rocks or artifacts just because they wanted to.

From stone-age treasures to your typical corner-store-knock-off Swiss Army knives, the things we carry around with us have always been full of weirdness.

Me? I had to get a second one of these (fav) Spurcycle Titanium Key Clips to accomodate the various pocket-proximate load outs on any given outing. The things we haul around daily — whether for utility or just because they feel right in our hands — well, it turns out that they connect us to ancient human habits.

Bruce’s essay on the strange oxymoronic weirdness of this ‘Everyday Carry’ business is curious on its own, but what I was particularly drawn to was his wondering about the schema of objects. The 2 by 2 up there sort of captures the discussion of the situatedness of things in that context. When is a thing a thing unto itself rather than a reproduction? Or a film prop? Or worthy of sitting on a guarded plinth under glass?

Beatriz da Costa was a friend and colleague whose creative-technologist engineering mind was superb and way ahead of its time. Her phenomenal “Pigeon Blog” project — in which pigeons wearing tiny tech'd up backpacks would map environmental sensor data from their airborn vantage — was a basis for the short essay I wrote in 2006 and lead to the Lift 06 Conference ‘Blogjects’ workshop I hosted with Nicolas Nova and others.

This book came out last year around the time of the LACE exhibition of Beatriz’ oeuvre, including a (updated) pigeon backpack and an epic release of a small flock of pigeons that did this beautiful biological compass orienting and them began their journey to their home in San Diego.

It was beautiful to watch, having met the confident seeming winged leader of the elite data gathering flock I could imagine him up there signalling to his gang — “Follow me, yo! One more for Beatriz! We got this!”

Beatriz was taken from us far too early by cancer, but her work and spirit live on. This book is a wonderful compendium of her work, life, and thinking.

1/ The core move was Brandon Harwood’s building of an “AI Interaction Atlas”: a shared taxonomy of capabilities (seeded from Hugging Face Tasks—a browsable list of model task types) that then gets refined into patterns tied to real product touchpoints.

2/ Diagram choice is strategy: Statecharts.dev (plain-English guide to statecharts/state machines) is for behavior over time, while UML (the standard “blueprint” notation for system structure/interaction) is for the parts and their relationships.

3/ When your system is basically a hierarchy, show it as a hierarchy: D3 “Tidy tree” on Observable (a canonical interactive example) pairs nicely with the original “tidy tree” layout paper Tidier Drawings of Trees (PDF).

4/ “Taxonomy” is too top-down for early-stage meaning-making; better to let a pattern language (networked patterns that call on each other) emerge socially, then harden it into something people can reuse.

5/ For inventing and remixing patterns, TRIZ (a systematic method built from recurring “patterns of invention”) is a surprisingly practical way to generate non-obvious moves when everyone’s stuck in the same default solution-space.

6/ Card decks came up as “portable curriculum”: PixelSpirit Deck (a physical deck for GL Shader Language concepts) is the proof-of-concept that a tight, tactile constraint system can teach a language faster than a wiki ever will.

7/ Reality check framing: Menlo Ventures’ “State of Generative AI in the Enterprise 2025” (enterprise adoption snapshot) is a reminder that “patterns” only matter if they map to budgets, workflows, and ops—not demos.

8/ The “hyper-drop festival” metaphor landed: build temporary, high-intensity studio conditions (stages, backstage, vendors, surprises) so collaboration happens as a byproduct, not an agenda item—think retreat infrastructure like Casa Tilo (retreat center near Barcelona) or Design Inquiry: From Mainland to Island (an intensive program built around place + making).

9/ On-ramping into the digital can be physical and weird: Grafedia (handwritten “hyperlinks” in the world) plus Mysterious Package Company (immersive mystery-in-a-box experiences) sketches a playbook for invitations that feel like artifacts, not URLs.

10/ Jesper described a paper he’s working on in which futures work gets reframed as an ethics practice: you can’t know the future, so the only leverage is what you choose to build (or refuse to build) right now and sometimes “making it consistent” means changing the world, not the model.

11/ Treat prototypes like real options (the “right but not obligation” to invest later): buy cheap optionality early, hold it while uncertainty clears, then exercise without pretending you had certainty all along.

12/ Unconference energy is the template: BarCamp Philly (attendee-built schedule) shows how “set the agenda in the room” beats pre-scripted panels—and the raw chat log here is already a dataset you can mine.

AI chatbots are everywhere, but not in Americans' news routines. Only a tiny sliver of adults use them for news, and even fewer trust what they find. Younger folks are leading the charge, but it seems that at the moment (at least..) skepticism runs high, as contrasted with the zelous optimism within the industry itself.

Is this one of those things that’s generational? Will Gen Z and Millennials grow up to be the AI news consumers of the future, or will skepticism persist as these technologies mature?

Just askin'...

Seems like the kids are more discerning then one may assume? Is that what this means?

So, maybe the kids are okay and they’re just having fun? And they realize that it’s all made up — and always has been?

But, seriously — the Pew Research is a good resource for a somewhat steady-hand look at how people are engaging with AI technologies in the wild. Worth keeping an eye on. They publish all their data, methodologies, and questions which at least gives a guy a fighting chance at making sense of trends.

This one came around via Tobias Revell’s latest Box of news newsletter that indexed to a take on those sleek, scroll-driven AI microsites that are quietly rewriting how we debate intelligence.

These seductive little persuasion portals blend a stark design (won’t save the world) with breathlessly urgent arguments that are not there to (only) inform but they also want to persuade.

Where once policy lived in dry reports, rows of 3-ring binders, and hastily stapled briefs, it now pulses through minimalist web pages that make you feel the stakes, and maybe even pick a side.

And parenthetically — that is why I find doing tangible artifacts as representations of, say, policy, governance, and strategic futures much more effective than just writing reports. The experience of engaging with something that feels real, tangible, and immersive makes a difference in how people relate to the ideas presented.

So, you know — come to General Seminar to see how I do this kind of work.