The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 25-year history of artport, its online gallery for commissioned net art, includes PDPal (2003) — a project I'll always be quite proud of and to have done in the company of my friends Marina Zurkow, Scott Paterson and Adam Chapman. It’s a super lovely surprise to see an early art-technology project in the company of the many artists and commissions that shaped artport’s history.

The OAS Is Hiring!

The Office of Applied Speculation (Santa Fe, NM & Remote) is looking for a senior individual contributor working across cultural research, emerging technologies, institutional habits, and authored artifacts that give changing conditions a form people can examine. OAS HR →

A modest contribution to this new book Futures Thinking: Using a Multidisciplinary Approach is from Routledge. The book is built for this world we inhabit — the one that moves faster than traditional planning is able to keep up. It brings together social research methods, data science, and foresight, then adds participatory design so real stakeholders and field voices shape what “the future” means. The book lays out frameworks, an integrated multidimensional methodology, and case studies, and it also focuses on building a culture of long-term thinking inside organizations.

This kind of futures work is exactly the kind of approach to strategy, product design, contingency planning, policy development, and organizational imagination that I've been advocating for and practicing for the last 20 years. It's super gratifying to see a book that brings together the methods, the practice, and the culture of futures work in a way that is accessible to practitioners and organizations.

Great work by Luca Simeone, Martino Bellincampi, Andrea Modica Bosinco, and Giacomo Spaini in bringing together such a remarkable range of contributors and perspectives!

Tim O’Brien’s project share from last Friday’s Office Hours points to The Condition Set, his blog about AI, labor, and the stories shaping public understanding of what’s happening.

William Fisk paints hyperrealistic portraits of seductive instances of modern industrial design that has been called Precisionism
h/t to Ian Chalmers for pointing me to Fisk's work!

Gen Z is turning sharply skeptical about AI even while they use it frequently. You can feel it in the backlash at graduations—booing leaders who promise AI will be the next “industrial revolution”—and in surveys where young adults report high awareness but strong worries about AI harming creativity, relationships, and society overall. Tech companies have started softening their messaging (less “mass layoffs,” more “augmentation”), but that doesn’t address why Gen Z feels like they’re on the losing side. The article argues that trust will only come from near-term policy guardrails similar to those used for other transformative technologies—covering labor impacts, intellectual property, and environmental protections—rather than from public relations campaigns.

It would be generous to say that privatesquare was ever released. Instead, the source code was made public with a long and twisty blog post and a flurry of screenshots.

This master’s thesis by Sari Kukkasniemi at Aalto University looks at the growing partnership between futures studies and design, focusing on how strategic designers anticipate what’s coming. Through narrative interviews with designers across Finnish consultancies, private companies, and public sector organizations, the thesis maps the methods and purposes behind futures work. The findings suggest designers mainly lean on probable and possible futures to make their work grounded and actionable, but they often don’t move beyond predictions and prescriptions to make room for truly novel futures. At the same time, designers use anticipatory methods to strengthen design’s future-orientation and to turn futures into something more tangible and, ideally, more democratic—using a wide mix of evidence-based and creative, interactive approaches.

The Reading Maps project traces Jack Kerouac’s journey in On the Road through an interactive map built with MapTiler and OpenStreetMap data. It turns a literary route into something that can be followed geographically.

This Interactions article examines science fiction as a source of inspiration for human-computer interaction. It distinguishes speculative ideation from pragmatic innovation, noting that fictional interfaces can open possibilities while also narrowing what designers imagine when treated as predictions.

This in-depth case study examines what happens when design fiction enters a corporate setting. Working with an automobile manufacturer on the near future of self-driving cars, the authors follow a year-and-a-half process that produced 24 artifacts and ask what corporate requirements do to speculative practice.

You’ll find reference to several of our Near Future Laboratory projects including ye olde IKEA catalog, the workshop favorite quick-start guide for a self-driving car HELIOS: PILOT, and that map of Geneva transformed by self-driving cars..some of your better examples of design fiction’s value in commercial/organizational applied speculation.

It’s a curious account of how applied speculation can open questions about products, services, and social consequences while remaining under pressure to produce affirmative, innovation-ready outcomes.

There will be no official transcript or tape recording provided from this edition of Office Hours, but here are a few notes from the conversation:

1) The conversation examined the tension between long-range speculative work and institutions shaped by short-term pressures, legal boundaries, and ownership agreements.

2) Fiction and other made artifacts can give difficult futures a form people can examine without turning a scenario into a prediction. Automation, regulation, infrastructure, public systems, and social change became questions with textures, behaviors, and surrounding worlds.

3) AI can help with drafting and iteration, while human judgment, revision, disclosure, and accessibility remain central to the work.

4) Generated images carry assumptions about race, gender, and identity. The discussion considered abstraction, obscured faces, and leaving some identities unassigned rather than forcing them into view.

5) Books can be living objects. Print, digital editions, serialized updates, and interactive layers each offer different ways for a work to change and accumulate context.

6) Tools, notation, and visual representations can widen access to difficult knowledge by revealing relationships hidden inside expert vocabularies or fixed sequences of instruction.

7) The conversation returned to a question that runs through much futures work: who gets to shape the future, and who gets to describe it?

Ramen with Chris Woebken and Sascha Pohflepp (RIP 🤍). Molly Wright Steenson and Jesus de Francisco were also there, FTR. September 21, 2010. Somewhere in Los Angeles.