FACILITATIONGENERAL SEMINARLEARNING & DEVELOPMENTWORKSHOP
The Outcomes
By February 2026, General Seminar had hosted 50 sessions across seven seasons. The deliberately small groups of 16–20 participants repeatedly filled, often with waiting lists. The season archive, event pages, worksheets, visual identities, and selected podcast excerpts carry the work beyond each live session.
A learning series built around participation
General Seminar is an event series I created and led through Near Future Laboratory, beginning in 2021. I designed it for people who wanted to examine fast-moving questions in technology and culture with others who brought different kinds of experience. By February 2026, I had hosted 50 sessions across seven seasons.
Each session began with a timely subject, careful preparation, and a question that participants could enter from more than one discipline. I curated the source material and guests, shaped the learning arc, then facilitated a small group through structured exploration and an extended conversation. The format gave participants a way to contribute their own examples, hear how others understood the topic, and develop their thinking through exchange.
A 90-minute learning arc
The recurring session design balanced orientation, small-group exploration, shared discussion, and reflection:
- Welcome and framing — 10 minutes. I introduced the topic, the question, and the material that would guide the session.
- Small-group exploration — 25 minutes. Participants compared perspectives and worked through a focused prompt together.
- Facilitated seminar — 50 minutes. We brought the small-group work into a guided discussion, connecting examples, questions, and differences in perspective.
- Closing reflection — 5 minutes. Participants named what they were taking from the session and what they wanted to keep examining.
The live format usually brought together 16–20 people. That scale gave me room to invite contributions across the group, keep the conversation moving, and make space for participants to respond directly to one another. Some sessions also used Design Fiction exercises: groups imagined a possible future through an ordinary artifact such as a course catalog, job listing, or other familiar format, then discussed what that object suggested about life in that future.
Topics across the seasons
The series moved among subjects whose implications reached across technology, culture, institutions, and daily life. Topics included:
- Artificial intelligence: ubiquitous and commodity AI, generative systems, agentic tools, digital twins, AI strategy, governance, and access.
- Digital culture and economies: blockchain, crypto gaming, DAOs, Web3, synthetic brands and media, augmented reality, and the metaverse.
- Work and learning: the future of jobs, education, fashion, and changing relationships between people, organizations, and technology.
- Ecological and cultural futures: circular economies, Solarpunk, and the images people use to describe more habitable futures.
- Ways of thinking and making: generalist practice, science fiction and strategy, Design Fiction, and the use of artifacts to examine a possible future.
I organized the topics around a continuing interest in how new technologies reshape culture, institutions, work, and everyday life. For each session, I built an accessible entry into a larger question and connected it to participants’ own experience.
The work behind each event
General Seminar required the work of a learning designer, producer, host, and facilitator. I selected and researched topics; developed the framing question and session materials; invited guests and participants; wrote event pages and agendas; coordinated dates, registration, ticket times, and the online event; and created the prompts and worksheets used in selected sessions. I also hosted each event and guided the group through its full arc, from opening context to final reflection.
After a session, I developed episode pages and recaps, and selected discussions became excerpts for the Near Future Laboratory Podcast. The General Seminar website organizes the work by season and episode, with event materials and worksheets where available. Its archive gives the series a lasting record of both the subjects and the way each meeting was prepared.
What the format made possible
The value of General Seminar came from its combination of preparation and participation. Curated sources gave people a shared point of reference. A carefully paced agenda kept the session focused while leaving enough room for participants to introduce evidence, experience, and questions the preparation could not anticipate. Small-group exercises made it easier to contribute; the full-group discussion let people compare interpretations and build on one another’s observations.
This approach made complex subjects approachable through focused material, clear prompts, and discussion that gave participants time to compare experience and interpretation. Participants could examine a question together and leave with specific examples, questions, or artifacts to use in their own work. Archived episode pages and selected podcast excerpts let people revisit the questions after each live meeting.
A record of my facilitation practice
General Seminar shows a distinctive strength in my work: I can take a seminar from topic selection and research through learning design, participant communications, event production, live facilitation, and documentation. I developed that complete practice across seven seasons and 50 hosted sessions, adapting the subject matter while keeping the format coherent and welcoming to people with different expertise.
Explore the General Seminar season and episode archive for event pages, session materials, and selected discussions.