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It was Week 14 of 2024 at Near Future Laboratory, and some things happened.
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➫ Creative Vitality Summit
➫ Super Seminar
➫ New Bundle
➫ Book Haul
➫ New Member Feature
It was the 14th week of two thousand and twenty four and a recurring theme was the recognition that an inability to dream of the world one wants to inhabit is a good way to ensure that one will never hold that world closely enough to make it a lived reality.
Week 14 was also the week that I announced Season 02 of SuperSeminar, the Learning & Development platform I started last year in which I bring to you interlocutors who will bring to you the kinds of insights and experiences that will evolve your professional skillset.
SuperSeminar Season 02 is focussed exclusively on Futures, Foresight and Innovation practices within large commercial organizations.
In Episode 01, we have presentations from Mike Milley, Principal Futurist at Mercedes-Benz North America, and Scott Smith, co-author of the fantastic Future Cultures and How To Future.
In Episode 02 we'll have Radha Mistry back again from Season 01. You'll remember Radha, formerly of Autodesk and now Associate Principal Americas Foresight Leader at Arup. We'll also have Paul Ferraiolo, who leads BMW Designworks' Los Angeles Creative Consulting Team, bringing his experience in design strategy from working with Rolls-Royce, Samsung and other large organizations.
Learn more about SuperSeminar and grab your ticket soon — I deliberately keep these small and intimate.
SuperSeminar is not a stadium show - it's a small salon designed to facilitate discussion, deep dives into topics such as how to integrate a futures-oriented practice within your organization and best approaches for representing the value of a strategic futures to leadership.
Also — please consider becoming a participant in the Near Future Laboratory creative collaborative by becoming a supporter on Patreon. All paid Patreon supporters receive discounts to SuperSeminar as well as an invitation to our creative community on Discord and invitations to join weekly Office Hours.
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Creative Vitality SummitEvents
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Check Out These Sessions! →
April 9 – 10, 2024
I'm in Boulder, Colorado this week where I'll be hosting a discussions of creativity in the era of AI at the Creative Vitality™ Summit.
"What's that," you ask?
Now in its third year, the Creative Vitality™ Summit will bring together artists, designers, technologists, arts advocates, and policy experts to consider the impact of new economic models, new forms of investment, and technological change in arts, culture, and the creative economy. Registration for this virtual event is free and is now open!
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The Dark Forest Anthology of the InternetBook Haul
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Read more about this release →
A first edition, physical copy of the 208-page book drop.
This is a book about how to survive on the internet. It’s about the cozy web, the dark web, the dark forest, the clear net, the dark net, and a new social world emerging around us.
The original “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” essay was published by Yancey Strickler in a private newsletter sent to 500 readers. The concept of the Dark Forest captured a feeling and sense of danger online that an increasing number of people shared.
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Futures, Foresight & InnovationLearning & Development
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Season 02 - Foresight & Innovation Experts From Industry →
Learn how futures and foresight practitioners do what they do, where they do it.
SuperSeminar is the opposite of things like TED, where you hear remarkable insights and perspectives from remarkable people — and don't get to engage in meaningful conversation with them. They're there..and then they're gone. SuperSeminar is not TED. It's a Salon-like discussion with two domain experts presenting short, incisive, evocative conversation starts — and then attendees and presenters engage in discussion. Limited seats. The value is in the opportunity for discussion.
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Seen in the Near Future Laboratory Discord Not Your Usual Weak Signals 📡
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In the 🎧-podcasts channel @Julian posted this
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Listen to The Santiago Boys on Spotify. The Santiago Boys is a nine-part podcast about a group of radical utopians around Salvador Allende, Chile's socialist president. Undeterred by the Cold War and machinations of their enemies and aided by an eccentric British consultant, they try to wrestle control over technology from multinationals and intelligence agencies and use it to create a more egalitarian economy. As their dream gets crushed by Pinochet's bloody coup, the Santiago Boys find an unexpected afterlife - and in Silicon Valley of all places. The series is written and presented by Evgeny Morozov, a leading technology critic.
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In the 🔋-solarpunk-futures channel @Julian posted this
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The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research offers an online course titled 'Solarpunk: Theory, Fiction, and Radical Futures,' instructed by Theodra Bane, exploring the integration of technology and nature through solarpunk's vision of sustainable futurism, communalism, and speculative fiction, aimed at reimagining modes of energy consumption and societal structures amidst climate change.
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In the 🔩-tools-and-resources channel @.chrizbo posted this
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Chris Butler advocates for integrating a moderate level of confusion in team settings as a catalyst for innovation and creativity, highlighting its utility in reframing problems and generating novel solutions by leveraging randomness and established strategies such as Oblique Strategies, albeit with modifications to suit specific professional contexts.
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In the 🔩-tools-and-resources channel @.chrizbo posted this
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Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt created the original deck of Oblique Strategies cards in 1974, a set of 115 handwritten cards designed to spark creative connections, now considered collector's items and having undergone several production iterations since their inception.
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In the 🔋-solarpunk-futures channel @kvrichard posted this
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The energy transition – the shift away from fossil fuels to CO2-free energies – is of central importance in mitigating the effects of climate change. How can today’s designs contribute to bringing about a genuine energy transition? Transform! brings together around 100 groundbreaking examples: from everyday products us
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In the 🧰-artificial-intelligence channel @pegaunisusicorn posted this
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Hume AI specializes in developing empathic artificial intelligence technologies, such as an emotionally intelligent conversational voice API and APIs for interpreting emotional expressions and custom modeling, all aimed at enhancing human well-being through improved emotional understanding and response.
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Near Future Laboratory Community
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Office Hours • Discord • Jobs Board
✳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
Time To Imagine Harder
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New NFL Discord Member NFL Community
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Ian Chalmers
↻ Ian is a Design Entrepreneur, founder and Creative Director of Pivot Design Group, an experience design consultancy in Toronto. Pivot Design Group specializes in design research, experience design and service design creating sustainable outcomes for our clients. Since it's founding 25 years ago, the studio has evolved a distinctive experience design brand, balancing creativity, critical analysis and intuitive thinking through the lens of research and design.
Ian also organizes events for designmeets.ca. Ian is also @ianchalmers
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🧱 An artifact you find interesting
I have a reproduction of a medical clay tablet from Sumeria, 2400 BCE. It's remarkable because it still contains its data after all these millennia and is beautifully ergonomic at the human scale, unlike the compact computers we carry in our hands
📽 A film that has shaped or influenced who you are today
Blade Runner, 1982 Ridley Scott's Director's Cut: for its sci-fi objects and experiences, lighting and textures, and ultimately what it means to be human.
🎧 A podcast worth listening to
Spark!
What else?
My father worked at NASA in Langley, Virginia, when NASA was established. He was a flight test engineer for the Mercury Mission and part of Gemini. He died at age 49. I have always been curious about his time at NASA. He was passionate about Sci-Fi, books, movies and shows. My mother often said that while watching Star Trek, he would comment on the mathematical possibilities of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's inventions.
Let's grow the network.
Connect with Ian↗.
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New Bundle Of Materials Tools, Books, Artifacts
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Everything Everywhere All We Got
↻ All the books. All the artifacts. All the cards.
So, I've put everything from the Near Future Laboratory Shop into one easy 25% off bundle. Look at all that stuff over there! All the books, including our latest artifact from the most likely alternative AI Android Future, Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the collectors' card set. Of course, there are the best sellers as well — TBD Catalog, the product catalog that started all of this — and The Manual of Design Fiction and its 'part 2' 'It's Time To Imagine Harder'.
Everything Everywhere All We Got for 25% off! Check It ↻.
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The Transmission
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Upon detecting an anomalous narrowband signal at 2296.481481 MHz the DSS tracking station supervisor initiated a comprehensive investigation. Collaborative analysis with White Sands Station and Guam confirmed the signal's non-terrestrial origin. The transmission was decoded with a narrator describing a mysterious entity referred to as 'The Box.' This report encapsulates the findings and ongoing inquiries into this unprecedented cosmic phenomenon, urging the scientific community to explore the intricate tapestry of space-time signals.
Have a Listen ⇨
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