Here it is. Another episode of 'Last Week from the Near Future'.

Last Week from the Near Future Laboratory - Week 48/2023

This is what I was thinking about.

1. Failure of Imagination: This concept is a common issue in organizations that struggle to envision anything beyond their current operations. Design Fiction can help with imagining and visualizing potential unexpected events and futures or even those that no one is able to grapple with or say out loud for fear of becoming a pariah. Design Fiction does this uniquely, behaving in a way like a court jester in some sense and thus help to avoid this pitfall.

2. AI Futures in Everyday Life: It is important that we imagine AI's impact on ordinary, everyday aspects of life, such as breakfast routines or sports, rather than just focusing on extreme dystopian or utopian scenarios.

3. Material Cultural Artifacts: Creating tangible representations of potential futures, like magazines from an imagined future, not only yield better, richer, more compelling and engaging visualizations of possible futures, the work required to create them is actual design work. Making to think and making to engage in conversations yields a richer way of 'ideating' and yields a deeper appreciation of possible outcomes.

4. Design Fiction: A brief description of the concept of Design Fiction as a tool to bring research to life, transforming dry, prose-based research into tangible, vivid, and relatable artifacts.

5. Importance of Vivid Representations: I try to underscore the value of creating vibrant, imaginative representations of the future, such as illustrations or fictional artifacts, to make future scenarios more relatable and understandable.

6. Near Future Laboratory’s Approach: We here at Near Future Laboratory uses Design Fiction to create artifacts and representations that help people envision and understand potential futures.

7. Future Seminar and Community Platform: We've got SuperSeminar (https://superseminar.school) coming up on Generative AI.

8. Discord: The Near Future Laboratory has a Discord community, now about 3 years old and with over 1000 members. To join, go to https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory