The catalogue for MoMA’s 2011 exhibition examines how designed things communicate through interfaces, information systems, behavior, tone, timing, and affordance. Its projects span phones, websites, games, visualization systems, furniture, products, and immersive environments, with particular attention to the ways objects interpret, guide, persuade, and create practical or emotional connections.

This is a mandatory reference book for anyone who imagines they are doing contemporary UX or interaction design in the autonomous systems space — by that I mean artificial intelligence — and is hoping to do something more than LLM-backed note taking and summarization, aiming instead to create meaningful and contextually aware interactions. (YOu can find it used on abebooks.com for anywhere from $10.13 - $1,976)

It includes one of my earliest art-technology projects, pre-iPhone but in the heyday of the PalmPilot — PDPal with Marina Zurkow, and Scott Paterson.

An open, interactive curriculum map organizes primary-school learning into 1,590 concepts and 3,221 prerequisite links, showing what comes first, what each concept unlocks, and why. Built from US and UK curriculum frameworks, it offers an open-source pathway for structuring lessons from early literacy through algebra.

Whole Foods. Yeah, I know. But what I didn't know is that its vibe started with an epic flood in Austin Texas until I checked out this newsletter/website.

Worse On Purpose is a curious dispatch that tracks how various kinds of corporate takeovers and cost-cutting measures we are all probably quite familiar with ends up degrading familiar products.

The maintainers of open source code — all that underpins everything you do on the internet which may be everything you do all day no matter what you do — are typically unaccounted for, unpaid, and overworked, shouldering the responsibility for the stability and security of the digital infrastructure without thanks. And now with vibecoding, everyone wants to submit PRs (pull requests) to contribute their own vibe-coded changes, adding to the workload and complexity for the maintainers who are already stretched thin. And seems like they've had enough.

A comparison of 25 AI models against the World Values Survey finds divergent moral and political tendencies. Most models skew more secular and liberal than the surveyed public, while Chinese models often point in another direction.

Sort of fascinating to contemplate and either correlate with one's instinct (“oh..that makes total sense..”) and wonder where you fit.

Principal, Applied Speculation — Meta

A speculative Meta principal-level role for building prototypes, interfaces, services, and situated artifacts that examine how AI may shape agency, trust, participation, and institutional life across product, research, policy, integrity, and communications.

Speculative Researcher, Misalignment Futures - OpenAI

Safety Systems sits at the forefront of OpenAI’s mission to build and deploy safe AGI, ensuring our most capable models can be released responsibly and for the benefit of society.

1) Shreya and Sneha used the Office Hours project-share mode to test a Design Fiction ideation workshop about education after twenty years of AI-assisted learning. Its central question was: “What does school look like when productive struggle has been optional for 20 years?”

2) The run-of-show introduced productive struggle, placed participants in a 2045 high-school scenario, and sent small groups into a time-machine exercise. Each group had to retrieve one pocket-sized object from the future school, describe where it was found, and explain the rituals and social conditions around it.

3) One group imagined a pirate-reality channel in which students use UV graffiti, hidden access codes, and private audio-visual overlays to create subcultures inside a homogenized AI education system. The object opened a discussion about belonging, clandestine study groups, curiosity, and social learning.

4) Another group proposed the “Illustrious,” a haptic brush that helps students recover patience, muscle memory, and individual expression in a world where AI supplies most answers. The brush became a way to discuss analog texture, practicing another artist’s process, and art as a form of self-expression.

5) A third group imagined a future sports room where students control repaired and upcycled robots in football matches. The scenario connected learning by doing with questions about physicality, hand-eye coordination, robot repair, frugal invention, and the distance between a student’s body and the machines they operate.

6) A fourth artifact, “Membrane,” was a sweat-sensing headband found in a school gym. It measured physical exertion as a proxy for effort and learning, opening a contrast between bodily struggle, mental effort, and future interfaces that require more physical expression.

7) The group found that the object was a useful anchor, while the richest discussion often concerned its surrounding ecosystem: curriculum, rituals, peer groups, teachers, infrastructure, and the larger society. Pawel Halicki’s Marble curriculum map gave that question a practical reference point by showing how school subjects connect across a larger learning system.

8) The debrief identified a tension in the activity sheet. A form can free participants from wondering what to produce, while naming and filling it in too early can shift attention toward compliance or product development. Softer prompts such as “the future you want to inhabit” or a fondly remembered school experience may provide better rails.

9) Participants suggested a second stage after the initial object-making: remix the groups and ask what lessons, exercises, skills, school structures, and social arrangements the artifacts imply. A third act could backcast from those futures to present-day experiments, including materials teachers could run in their own districts.

10) The test established prototypes as communication devices rather than finished answers. A brush, headband, secret channel, or robot controller made an imagined educational system available for shared examination, while the follow-up discussion supplied revisions to the workshop structure and its possible SXSW EDU proposal.