Near Future Laboratory Newsletter

Date: June 9, 2025

Summary: This newsletter explores the intersection of aging, purpose, and design, highlighting a workshop focused on reimagining longevity beyond simply extending lifespan. It delves into the importance of creative thinking – particularly the role of artists – in navigating an increasingly AI-driven future, examines emerging technologies like SmolVLM, and investigates unsettling trends in publishing like “shitpublishing.” The newsletter also touches upon the need for successor aesthetics to cyberpunk and advocates for integrating creative energy into organizations through workshops and strategic partnerships.

Essentially: A workshop that asks "What if aging isn't about *living* longer, but about living *better*?" It’s a nudge to rethink how we design our lives and businesses in an age of rapid technological change.

But why? This email signals a shift towards designing for human flourishing rather than just extending biological life. The focus on creative thinking (artists as strategic assets) and the critique of AI-driven optimization are crucial considerations for organizations seeking to innovate authentically. It’s about recognizing that true progress isn't solely driven by efficiency, but by fostering meaning and purpose – a core tenet of Near Future Laboratory’s work. The exploration of “shitpublishing” highlights a broader cultural shift worth considering as we grapple with the impact of automation on creative expression.

Elysia, Emily, Rahmin and I ran a workshop last Friday, hosted in IDEO's offices.
It was one of several workshops at San Francisco Design Week 2025.
(I was told ours was the best one because it was alive, hands-on, and kinetic.)
What did we workshop?
The set up was simple. Something everyone can relate to, even if we repress the truth of it all.
We are all aging.
Every day.
Is longevity about living longer? About finding the way to extend biological life?
Suppose it is not about length of life so much as fullness of purpose?
What happens if we make aging about longevity rather than life extension?
How does the semantic shift adjust the way we design for more purposeful lives?
Can we find the way to think of aging as a continuing path towards a sense of purpose and value?
These were our guiding sensibilities as we engaged a group of more than 50 participants in a 2-hour futuring workshop.
The vibe in the room was alive. You can sense the energy.
IDEO folks who were not in the workshop were poking their heads around the corner to see where all the vibe was emanating from.
The engagement ran deep and thorough.
People did not want to leave.
And you all know what my KPIs are: did people smile? Were they leaning forward into the work. Were they in conversation with each other?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Is this the kind of workshop and development context you are trying to bring into your organization?
This is (one of the things) I do here at Near Future Laboratory with teams like my friends at Age Of_
Let's get in touch and talk about how we can bring this kind of creative energy into your organization to help your team unlock their potential as they work through the challenges of imagining into your organization's future products, services, brand purpose, and more.

Episode N°098

Studio Life with N O R M A L S

This episode is a vital discussion for anyone who believes that the creative spirit is worth preserving, even in the face of relentless optimization. It's a call to arms for those who feel that the relentless march of efficiency is stifling their creativity and and ultimately that thing we loosely call 'innovation' — the space where sense can be made out of chaos and confusion.

Read More ⇒

What if imagination and creativity were your strategic advantage? ➜

⁠🧢-generalists-club⁠ via @(Kevin) SkepticalDesign

In an era of data obsession and AI-powered solutions, we've sidelined a crucial catalyst for transformation: the artist's mind. While businesses scramble to hire more engineers and data scientists, could they be overlooking their most powerful allies in navigating uncertainty and driving innovation?
This isn't just a provocation. It's a call to rethink who we allow to shape the future of business.

Play with the smallest Vision Language Model ➜

⁠🛠-whats-ai-good-for-anyway⁠ via @Julian

SmolVLM-256M is the smallest multimodal model in the world. It accepts arbitrary sequences of image and text inputs to produce text outputs. It's designed for efficiency. SmolVLM can answer questions about images, describe visual content, or transcribe text. Its lightweight architecture makes it suitable for on-device applications while maintaining strong performance on multimodal tasks. It can run inference on one image with under 1GB of GPU RAM.

AI as Normal Technology ➜

To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are "normal" in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

Always judge a book by its cover ➜

⁠📃-articles-and-essays⁠ via @Julian

Shitpublishing defines the uncanny book valley. These things are made to look like books, but if you approach them as a "readership" you will have an unheimlich experience. These oddly familiar publications inhabit the margins of what is publishable. They are positioned somewhere between real books that sound fake and fake books that could be real.

See you in the alterdoom ➜

⁠🥋-shill-and-share⁠ via @lance robotson

Why haven't we articulated any successor aesthetics to cyberpunk?

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Another Design Fiction artifact found in the Dispatches Section of the Near Future Laboratory Website, my archive of worldbuilding speculations.