Digests of General Seminar S05/E01

General Seminar Season 05 Episode 01 happened, and now I’ve got the digests up on the various nozzle endpoints.

I hosted General Seminar, two sessions, on May 21st both traveling into possible AI Futures. Both were super vibrant and engaged as we rooted around for the kinds of products and implied experiences/services we might see in these futures.

Have a listen to the digests I’ve put together on the podcast feed for GS S05/E01 10AM and GS S05/E01 3PM

Or watch the digests on Youtube 👇🏽

In these digests, I picked several of the intriguing results.

The way General Seminar works is we break out into small groups and discuss the kinds of implications of AI, as we might see or find them in the future — we look for artifacts, not vague pronouncements or prognostications.

Like I often say, “What’s for breakfast in the AI Future?”

If you want to think about ‘the future of work’ in an AI world, don’t predict what the jobs might be, create a ‘Help Wanted’ advertisement from that fuuture.

This is the Design Fiction way, the approach we use to attach our imagination to the future in viseral, tangible ways

We’ve only fetishized the ‘report’ or the ‘prediction’ as ways of sense-making.

What I am arguing for is the creation of implications in relatable forms, at a minimum to ‘augment’ the report, trend analysis, essay — or even Science Fiction story.

p.s. Design Fiction is not Science Fiction with props. Design Fiction is not a prose-based story. Design Fiction is a thing as you might find it on your bedside table and expressed as such. Design Fiction is the newspaper advertisement, not a story about a newspaper advertisement.

Want to know more? Get yourself some Design Fiction materials, tools, and artifacts from possible futures and, of course, The Manual! 👇🏽