It was Week 10 of 2024 at Near Future Laboratory, and some things happened.
|
|
|
➫ Futures Brought To Life
➫ Street Signs from A Future
➫ General Seminar Season 05
➫ Casual Islands LA Unconference
This is the constantly evolving Near Future Laboratory Back Office Newsletter. You are one of 17,000 subscribers who appreciate the value of a futures-oriented mindset.
My thesis here is that the work we do is not a zero-sum game. We work with individuals, organizations, big brands, and educational institutions to reignite an appreciation of our existentially vital capability to Imagine possibility.
Our goal is to unlock your potential to make sense of and find value in creative practices and bring about meaningful, tangible change. Call that 'innovation', if you like.
We seek others — individuals, institutions, brands, companies — who want to collaborate, coordinate, and amplify this goal.
Please help me by supporting this work.
How? You can (1) grab something from our 100% independently designed, manufactured, and published books and tools over at shop.nearfuturelaboratory.com, (2) join the NFL Discord by becoming a sustaining member at patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory, (3) commission us to help you invest in your future and your potential, (4) amplify this by sharing with friends and colleagues.
|
| |
SxSW 2024 Workshop
Imagining possible futures through street signs! The street sign is a fantastic Design Fiction archetype. It's an artifact that is quite legible and recognizable as an indicator of social norms, rules, policy and thereby a small signal of a culture.
Read More ⇒
|
|
| |
Book Haul
|
|
Futures Brought To Life is a volume that explores our understandings of being and doing futures; being in a future as an experience and doing the imagination of possible futures with others. It features essays from The Yes Men, Superflux, Scott Smith & Susan Cox-Smith, Extrapolation Factory, Eva-Maria Spreitzer, Judith Mahler, tons more, and even me! Put out by the fine souls at Time's Up there in Linz, Austria 🇦🇹.
Read More ⇒
|
|
|
Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics In Art And Architecture is an argument for the way Imagination, Art and the creative consciousness operates at the vanguard of meaningful cultural evoltuion. The rational modern — the other pole of the creative consciousness - turned bureaucratic between the 1930s and 1960s, Matthew Allen, the author, argues. He goes on to describe how artists, designers and architects anticipated the computer by adopting 'serial effects.' This shift was a cherished dream of modernism, replacing composition with organization as a basis of design. Beautiful book design in the hand. Also available from the publisher as an Open Access PDF.
Read More ⇒
|
|
| |
IRL F2F Unconferences Are Back!
Causal Islands LA is about the future of computing, and connecting people across different specializations and disciplines to come together – to get off of their islands and coordinate, collaborate, and amplify their dreams & visions as to what computing should be notwithstanding what Elon, Sam, and Sundar think.
Read More ⇒
|
|
| |
|
|
General Seminar Imagines Harder
Let's cut through the hype, the noise, the prognostications, and predictions — and ask ourselves, "Yeah. Okay. AI. But what's for breakfast in an AI future when it's all said and done? And how did we prepare it? What's 'work' in an AI future and what do I do, and how did I learn how to do it? What might it be like to vacuum a dirty rug or take the dog for a walk? How do we book a vacation or arrange for pickleball lessons? How might we make a dinner reservation — and get to the restaurant? Who's our date to that dinner and how did we meet?"
Reserve your seat now!
|
|
|
In the 🧰-artificial-intelligence channel @fkvrichard posted this
|
|
Creativity has existed since the dawn of humankind and is something humans inherently possess as a capacity and a process. Creativity is applied in everyday activities (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009; Richards, 2007) and in situations where solutions to problems are at the center of creative activities and artistic endeavors. With the growing interest in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the availability of technical AI chatbot tools such as Chat-GPT, Google Bard, Microsoft Bing, Jasper, and others, the authors’ study explores if and how students can enhance their creative thinking skills, in particularly their divergent thinking skills, through the use of Chat-GPT-3.
|
|
|
In the Berlin channel @janmuehlig posted this
|
|
On March 16, we will do our next Future Writing workshop. This time we imagine (harder) what forests will be for us. Our aim is to create small speculative stories that inspire and potentially lead to 'how might we ...'. In German (English version following soon).
|
|
|
In the 📵offgrid-futures channel @Mateusz posted this
|
|
The Resilient Networks NYC initiative, supported by the New York City Economic Development Corporation's RISE program, collaborates with local partners in five neighborhoods to develop community-owned mesh networks designed for resilience in flood-prone areas, with ongoing efforts to build emergency communications capacity through Portable Network Kits.
|
|
|
In the 🎧-podcasts channel @Drew Wiberg posted this
|
|
Gabby Morris, an award-winning designer and Regenerative Futures lecturer at Glasgow School of Art, discusses her innovative projects and emphasizes the importance of educational methods that foster optimism, creativity, and systemic thinking towards cultivating regenerative futures.
|
|
|
In the 📝-general channel this was posted
|
|
Vice Media fires everyone but forgets to turn off the podcast backend 🤦🏽♂️ and a few journalist leave their final, erm..reflections when they find the podcast backend still accessible.
The file titled "CYBER - The End of Vice.mp3" is an audio file with a MPEG format. This digital object possesses a size of 31 megabytes and features an unspecified duration. According to metadata, it was created and subsequently modified on the 26th of February, with initial creation at 3:49 PM followed by a modification one minute later at 3:50 PM. The ownership of the file is attributed to an individual named REDACTED.
|
|
|
In the 🍿-films-and-shorts channel @Julian posted this
|
|
Spike Jonze's film "Her" continues to offer profound insights into artificial intelligence, exploring complex emotions in human-AI relationships with a nuance and depth that surpasses many of its contemporaries, even a decade after its release. Released over a decade ago, it continues to provide a nuanced depiction of artificial intelligence (AI) relationships, far surpassing many of its contemporary works in the genre. The Verge's Sheon Han argued that the film's strength lies in its exploration of the human-like AI's emotional complexities rather than dystopian fears of AI dominance.
|
|
| |
Featured Discord Member Project Stay Creative
|
|
: Filmmaker & futurist
O'Neill is a filmmaker and futurist at the intersection of entertainment, science & technology who is passionate about creating stories to unite audiences around visions of better futures. Taryn just directed the 'hopeful futures' short film 'The Assignment' for ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination, producing and writing with her Scirens co-founder Tamara Krinsky. Check It ↻.
|
|
| |
Join the Near Future Laboratory Discord
|
|
The Near Future Laboratory Has A Community. We Do Futures Projects at the Vanguard of The Not True *Yet
✳Paid Subscribers Get Discord Access✳
↯ A Magazine from an AI Future
↯ A Magazine from a Future of Cinema
↯ A Magazine from a Fashion Future
↯ General Seminar's Starting Up!
↯ Foresight Futures Super Seminar Soon!
↯ Weekly Office Hours & Coffee Calls
Join the NFL Community
|
|
| |
|
Artifact from a Possible Future
A Future of Humane Protein Harvesting
|
|
|
|
Jocko's Hand Choked Elk Meats
The Honorably Harvested Protein™
100% blockchain authenticated free-range J-Elk™ Live Large in the Choked Elk Mountain Range. They are treated humanely, living amongst their own. They are never tagged, nor hunted. When harvest time comes around, we engage a maximum of 4 adults in close-quarters hand-to-hoof death matches giving our Elk a fighting chance at survival.
Choked Elk Meats' Elk are never physically, verbally nor emotionally shamed, and we never nozzle our matches on the UFC Underverse Feed unlike the other guys' farms.
Our Super Champions, having survived four (4) Eth Seasons of matches with our Certified Jiu-Jitsu Masters, have earned their right to live their natural life — and to die a natural death.
With Choked Elk Mountain J-Elk®, you know you are getting a bounty that fought a good fight, and died an honorable "Death by By Mortal Combat."
Choked Elk Mountain Meats: The Honorably Harvested Protein™.
Read More ⇒
|
|
| |
| |
