I started cobbling together the various units of work that went into making OMATA, but not just he engineering for the instrument itself. The story of the story of the device. I’ve been going back through the materials from those years and gathering them into a project archive.

I think I was doing this because I was trying to riddle through a question I get asked that leaves me a bit nauseous: “what is it you do, exactly?”

Pointing out examples isn't always helpful.

Would that I were a dental hygenist or something that everyone “gets”. And they “get” it because they've encountered it in a way that they can feel directly, because, you know — “that's the person who crawls around in my mouth, leaving me with a fresh minty taste and a tingle in my gums.”

Sadly, there's not one word to explain that I can build a brand, build an app, write a patent, and fly to a factory, and facilitate a creative workshop, and lead a creative project.

I was told the other day that maybe I should say, “design technologist” because I can listen to the conversations amongst those who carry a name and a title, and hear what it is they are not quite saying that needs to be said.

If that's what a design technologist these days does, then that's what I do. I was also given this phrase from a guy who is very much like me (we could be professional cousins): Interesting things happen when I'm in the room.

OMATA happened in that room for sure.

Maxxing — whether it’s looks, sleep, protein, or testosterone — frames self-improvement as a narrow, measurable goal that demands sacrifice. Friend of the Lab Ian Bogost argues that this mindset is a natural extension of an optimization culture built on efficiency, where people increasingly ask how to do things faster or better instead of what they’re for. Which is why I think this idea of imagination asymmetry is relevant and why having curious clever imaginative people in the room whose value cannot be measured is existentially vital. So Ian offers a possible antidote: wonder, which he says is the ability to feel awe in ordinary moments. I'd say it's (also) the opposite of taking anything for granted, even if it seems like a silly idea..like putting wheels on luggage.

Friend of the Lab Sabrina Sullivan and colleagues have organized a futures event in a city that has a history of being at the frontier — Calgary Alberta.

I love this because it's incredibly refreshing to see the question of futures not solely situated in places that one immediately associates — perhaps naively — with “future.” But when they asked if I would participate, I was immediately drawn to the idea for that reason, as well as thinking of Calgary as a frontier.

Check out the Agenda and Apply to Join there on the calgaryfutures.com site.

Sabrina Sullivan discusses the Calgary Futures Forum. Alex Kauffmann demonstrates CrankGPT, a hand-powered voice agent running locally on a Raspberry Pi 5, and the group considers what physical effort, privacy, and play change about an AI device. Rodney Frederickson shares image experiments that use weathering, lineage, and material processes to produce new compositions.