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The AI future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed. Yet.
That's why I started the Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio.
It's a Studio in the traditional sense _ a place to study, research, prototype, learn, craft, make, build.
Less yammering. More hammering.
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🦌-images-only-visually-inspiring via @Drew Wiberg
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Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio is not a place so much as a focus of Near Future Laboratory. It's still me here. I'm still sitting in the same chair, with the same puppy at my side, with the same computer window into the computational networks.
It is a focused prototyping-based research program that explores the potential of artificial intelligence in the context of everyday life.
It’s where I can take things like Neal Stephenson’s reflections on AI he gave to a private audience (see the item at the end of the newsletter) to consider AI as a kind of intelligent species — not unlike the other intelligent species we’ve been living and collaborating and cohabitating with forever, and wonder what that would be like as an everyday experience.
What if..AI was taken to be more like a crow? Or a puppy? Or some species that cannot be domesticated? Or a weather system? And rather than only writing a story about that, or a user experience scenario, or a policy paper, or a blog post — we also made artifacts from that future, and rapidly prototyped functional systems? In the process of that and with the resulting artifacts, surely then we’d have augmented our understanding of the possibilities, beyond the sometimes pedestrian comprehensions of what this new territory means, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what it would be to inhabit it full-time. And — something to point at that was experiential and perhaps more legible for that ability to be experienced.
This is the focus of the AI+DF Research Studio, and we're seeking collaborations and sponsorships. We do rapid ideation and prototyping, creating small, functional artifacts that help ground possibilities in materiality and interaction.
The prototypes are meant to be views into possible futures. They exhibit and effervesce the qualities, textures, rhythms, opportunities and character of life lived in an AI world.
Our first explorations were general topics across domains of the lived experience: jobs (value creation), housing (shelter), music (story), art (feeling), consumer products (hopes + dreams), crime/malfeasance, and governance+policy.
The outcomes and keyfindings were represented in the form of a newspaper from a possible AI future.
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“Tomorrow's New Today”
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Our second exploration derived from the experiences and discussions surrounding the creation of that newspaper: In an AI future, what would storytelling, creative writing be or become? How would a writer journal the world in order to feel that they were a journalist contributing to a 'newspaper'?
Rather than attacking the question in the broadest possible terms, we went sharply towards tools: what are ways that writing might evolve in a world where AI was as weird as bottled water or jogging is today?
We've been creating several functional prototypes that help open up that question both by wondering about it but also wandering into tool making. (You see what I mean by 'less yammering, more hammering' now? Making functional futures prototypes of things that 'could become' in order to help think about things that could be. It makes the strategic aspect of futuring much more tactical than just a 'deck'.)
Read more and join the working group. We're seeking collaborations and sponsorship.
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What my high school band teacher taught me about AI
Collaborative writing with an alien intelligence
I love to write.
Really, I do.
But I struggle with it.
I write by saying in an inner voice what I want to appear on the page, and then hope the muse comes to me and a flow begins.
Then I thought about Jazz. And improvisation. And the beautiful things that can happen in the unexpected exchanges of a Jazz quartet. And what I learned from Dr. B, the remarkable Princeton High School band director I was fortunate enough to learn from.
For the AI-DF Research Studio we wondered what it would be like to activate a muse-like interaction modality with AI.
This speculative prototype was the result.
Written in Rust. Supports integration with OpenAI as well as local models via LM Studio or Ollama.
Read More ⇒
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A Design Fiction Workshop at SF Design Week
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Aging
We're all doing it.
We've been thinking about aging all wrong.
Longevity is not about adding years to your life, despite what those guys with the brain freezers tell you.
It's about adding life to your years.
Longevity is about thriving with purpose, passion, and potential.
The number of people over 80 globally will triple between 2020 and 2050.
What is longevity?
It's time to imagine harder.
On June 6th, I'll be co-hosting a Design Fiction workshop with my friends at AGE OF_ as part of SF Design Week.
The workshop sold out in less than a day.
But you can stay signed up to the newsletter to hear about what we discover about more habitable futures of aging.
Read More ⇒
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Things from the NFL Discord
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Kevin Kelly once opined that all one needs is 1000 true fans. I suppose the variable here is to wonder what “true” means. Its a bit of a semantic game — which might be useful and generative — to wonder further. Let’s consider that fandom isn’t about numbers, but about building worlds and cultures into which people can deep-dive and live within.
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"AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away."
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Very quickly, AI has evolved from an experimental curiosity to an indispensable creative partner for designers worldwide.
It's also intensely divisive.
How is it being adopted? How is it changing the practice?
The State of AI in Design report is based on a survey of 400+ designers and conversations with leaders at Stripe, Notion, Anthropic, and more.
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"I'm not sure where the hell it came from. But, recently on LinkedIn, I've noticed this phenomenon where entrepreneurs, growth-hackers, and digital marketers are posting poorly-written self-help-like 'prose' littered with clichés and vague blanketed statements."
The Story Behind the Strange and Bewildering Trend That's Eating LinkedIn
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Speaking of Kevin Kelly, you'll be familiar with his whole..Cool Tools vibe. You know, where he identifies cool tools or cool people with cool tools and sort of..rolls it all up for his surely many more than 1000 true fans.
Anyway, here's a roll up of the cool tools. (You're very welcome.)
P.S. I was on Kevin’s Cool Tools show a few months back! Check out what cool tools we talked about here ➜ Cool Tools Episode 409
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Neal Stephenson wondered aloud: "Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren't human is to consider the fact that we've been doing exactly that for [as] long as we've existed, because we live among animals."
Lions, tigers, bears, mosquitoes, crows and, if we stop letting a few guys overdetermine the futures we will inhabit, we might get benevolent puppies.
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There's way more hand-curated things to be found in the Near Future Laboratory Discord. All you need to do is join our Patreon community for about the price of a decent hand-crafted coffee and a delicious cake to go along with it. Please support the community through Patreon, join the Discord, and participate in our weekly Office Hours.
Oh. By the way. The new Office Hours format — 2 or 3 short presentations of work, work-in-progress, your thesis project — has been fantastic. Last week we had Korf presenting a new trend capturing platform he's side-project'ing, and Kirby Ferguson shared his new Dream Logic series.
If you've come to a past event, you'll get invites to join. If you haven't please join the Near Future Laboratory Patreon!
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An Evening Event In The Real World
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SideShow: Where Side Projects Take Center Stage
One night. A room full of artists, designers, filmmakers, and creative people sharing the work they're making outside the brief. Sound experiments. Illegible interfaces. Broken narratives. Tools bent into new shapes. Ideas with no client, no deadline, no plan—just the need to try something no one asked for. A rare glimpse into experimental ventures headed straight into unknown territory.
Futurespaces and Near Future Laboratory bring you SideShow on June 12th, 2025 at 6:00 PM at the Proper Hotel in Santa Monica, CA.
Find out more and RSVP ⇒
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🦌-images-only-visually-inspiring via @Julian
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🦌-images-only-visually-inspiring via @Julian"
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