Last week General Seminar treated the moment we are currently inhabiting like a live science-fiction action spectacular event: not “what do we believe,” but “what do we do when this becomes normal?”

The focus of the seminar was on the agentic future...whatever that means. We used speculative archeology to dig for artifacts that might be found in the material culture of this future, and we found all kinds of things: physical objects that could help us navigate the swarm of agentic AI that is arriving, conversations about active decision making cancellation, and the uneasy slider between convenience and consent.

Here's the topline from the seminar, in 11 nuggets:

1) I opened this session by warming up my janky time machine and with that I proposed a bit of a context set: let's not declare the agentic future. Rather, let's explore like we're on an expedition into that future, rooting around for it like we're time-traveling archeologists.

2) To tune our senses, I reached for those moments when culture flips in public: Bob Dylan plugging in, punk spilling out of CBGB, and Dick Fosbury going over the high bar backwards. These are moments we can point to to get a sense of what evolution feels like.

3) Then we hit the headline that made everyone squint, screw their faces in variously anguish or confusion or excitement: OpenClaw, moving so fast it barely holds a stable name, and acting like a kit for spinning up many agents at once.

4) In the chat, someone called it a “Yes And..” sorta moment, and someone else named it as a backwards leap, because it changes the rules by changing the posture.

5) We held one distinction up to the light and kept rotating it: AI agents that follow instructions versus agentic AI that makes choices, has goals, perhaps intention — and the uneasy slider between convenience and consent. I wondered about a toaster in an agentic future — one whose goal is less about making toast and more about making the household feel the feeling of the smell of fresh toast and the feeling of the thought of a bit of butter and honey on that toast. Not an instrumental aspiration of a robot — “must make toast” the kind of code an engineer might assume; but a semantic aspiration — create a feeling, a mood..that is the “agentic goal.”

6) From there, voice became the obvious doorway, with one participant describing how Monologue lets them work while walking, and how this shifts agency into the air around us.

7) One breakout brought back a ring and a phrase that felt like a product label and a confession: Active Decision Making Cancellation: ON.

8) They also found actual claws hanging on walls, where the opening of the claw tells the agents how much autopilot you are requesting in that moment.

9) Another breakout imagined diminished reality, not more overlays but less noise, with a chair that filters interruptions like a physical boundary you can sit inside.

10) That chair reminded us of Brick, the little talisman of friction that makes you travel back to the object before you reclaim distraction.

11) We closed with a simple practice: if the agentic future is arriving as a swarm, we should prototype the knobs, rings, claws, and furniture that keep it livable.

If you want to read the full after action report, you can find it here: General Seminar S07 E03 After Action Report.

And subscribe to my Luma so you can be sure to get invited to future General Seminars and other events: Near Future Laboratory on Luma.

1/Today marked the 300th Friday in a row that I have hosted Offie Hours, and the group treated it like a practice worth celebrating, not a streak to take for granted. There were party hats ftw!

2/ We opened with a small ritual of celebration, a reminder that we mustn't take things like gatherings of this sort for granted (they need support otherwise they wither and shrivel) and a reminder that we can choose our own milestones — and then we drifted into the kind of joyful side quest that feels like the point of this series: I discovered an artist at the Howard Smith exhibition.

3/ That thread turned into a quiet history lesson about cultural exchange, soft power, and who gets remembered, which set an unexpectedly sharp backdrop for what came next which was a complete and welcome surprise — a visit from professional skateboarder and Olympian Lizzie Armanto. How awesome! Lizzie's been a dear friend since I worked on my “Hello, Skater Girl” photobook project when she was, like..I dunno..a senior in high school I think it was. Now..she's an Olympian and Pro Skater (and has a second-self as herself in a video game)!

4/ Lizzie described the Tokyo Olympics debut of skateboarding for Finland, and how an unsponsored apparel slot became a design invitation, a little loophole where identity and craft could show up as a uniform on a world stage Olympics uniform story.

5/ From there we started imagining sponsorship as a cultural platform, not just marketing, including the mischievous thought that a small studio could collaborate with under supported teams and bring local makers into the spotlight, with LA 28 humming in the background.

6/ Skateboarding became our lens for urban futures: Copenhagen as a place where parks double as sculpture and rideable infrastructure, and the curb cut effect as a design principle that quietly expands mobility for everyone.

7/ People traded examples of skate urbanism, corridors that are both shortcut and gathering place, and even ditches that serve flood control when it rains and skate terrain when it does not.

8/ Then the conversation dropped into craft, the way good seminars do: wheel size, hardness, durometer, and the reality that tiny material decisions change what is possible, what is safe, and what kind of joy a surface can hold.

9/ Photography and film came in as a second board under our feet, with talk of fisheye intimacy, drones threading rafters, and the simple feedback loop of filming a trick to see yourself from the outside so you can learn faster.

10/ We closed in a surprisingly hopeful register, tracing a line from recycled materials and Skate Light building culture to solarpunk vibes and the reminder that 300 Fridays is not a trophy, it is a community choosing to keep showing up.

The Manual of Design Fiction (The "How"): A 15-year culmination of work by The Near Future Laboratory that details the methods and practical approaches to creating artifacts from potential futures.

It’s Time to Imagine Harder (The "Why"): Explores the motivation behind Design Fiction, encouraging the use of imagination to explore possibilities rather than just predicting gadgets. An engaging look into the critical importance of Design Fiction for creating more habitable future worlds with a sense of play and creativity.

TBD Catalog (The "What"): The future...as seen in a product catalog! A 10th-anniversary edition serving as a canonical example of what Design Fiction objects and scenarios feel like.

Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (The "What If"): A collection of speculative scenarios that explore the implications of emerging technologies and societal trends — an invitation to you to consider a world in which machines do in fact have dreams.

Hi! Welcome. 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. You can even read about it in these two books — The Manual of Design Fiction and It's Time to Imagine Harder.

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.

Caught in the endless swirl of opinions on AI and art, the author dives into the messiness of the conversation itself. With artists, historians, and skeptics all around, every attempt to make sense of it reveals just how tangled—and human—this debate really is. Rather than boiling it down to easy answers, these essays aim to find what’s real and meaningful amid the noise.

Design Factory Manchester unveils 'Design Fiction for Peace', a groundbreaking project uniting Europe's design schools to promote peace through innovative design.

The MacGuffin Pattern is a strategic approach where a visible deliverable drives inevitable systemic changes. And you know how strategy and service design people like their patterns and frameworks...loosen up fellers!

Anyway..

It’s a method where the Matter Laye — that thing that gets funded and implemented — triggers changes in the Meta Layer — that thing that actually needs to transform.

This pattern is evident in the adoption of electric vehicles, which necessitated infrastructure changes, and in the GOV.UK consolidation project, which subtly shifted government IT procurement and service design practices. By focusing on a tangible project, organizations can create a compelling narrative that justifies necessary but less visible systemic changes, making it a powerful tool for driving transformation in complex systems.

For you Hitchcock fans/nerds you'll know that the MacGuffin was a plot device that motivated the characters and drove the story forward, but was ultimately unimportant to the audience. You know — the Rabbit's Foot in Mission Impossible; the Maltese Falcon in, you know..The Maltese Falcon.

In strategic contexts, the MacGuffin serves a similar purpose: it’s a visible project or initiative that captures attention and resources, while the real transformation happens in the background. By designing the MacGuffin thoughtfully, organizations can create a compelling narrative that justifies necessary but less visible systemic changes, making it a powerful tool for driving transformation in complex systems.