week 33 / 2025: how much is too much?
Or, phrased differently: what do the IPCC's climate change scenarios have in common with the Star Wars franchise?
worldbuilding
week 32 / 2025: conspiracy culture
There's nothing like looking at the disposable popular culture of three decades previous for reminding you that there's nothing new under the sun, and that history moves in waves rather than an arc.
week 31 / 2025: churches of futurity
What can we learn about futures from thinking about them as if they were faiths or fandoms? Quite a lot, if you ask me...
week 29 / 2025: rifts in the schismatrix
Here's another way to look at the difference between science fiction and fiction-for-futures: the former is art, the latter is artifice.
week 28 / 2025: the concretisation of metaphor
The tools of science fiction can be put to use in the storying of scenarios, but in such cases, they are means to a somewhat different end. How might we usefully describe that distinction?
unknown pleasures: an interview with Cameron Tonkinwise (part 2)
In the second part of my interview with Cameron Tonkinwise, we discuss Transition Design, prefigurative politics, dramaturgy, narratology, imagination, and... urban cycling as filtered through the philosophy of Georges Bataille?
design designs designers: an interview with Cameron Tonkinwise (part 1)
In this first half of my interview with Cameron Tonkinwise, we discuss design as a practice that necessarily takes place in an already-designed context, and what that practice has in common with worldbuilding.