This isn’t a panel or a podcast. General Seminar is an active, collaborative workshop—a space to engage your imagination and critical thinking by producing Design Fiction artifacts that emerge from this provocation.
Through break-out sessions with your fellow attendees, worksheets, and group discussions, we'll explore how education can evolve — perhaps should evolve — in a contingent world where the imposition of things like AI, algorithmic learning, and new roles — even epistemologies — are all around us. We’ll consider the implications of AI in education, from the mundane to the radical, and how these changes might affect our lives.
Together, we will generate fictional-yet-feels-real artifacts like school supply catalogs from 2035, feedback reports from AI tutors, enrollment contracts for synthetic apprenticeship platforms, or even rebellious zines authored by students resisting algorithmic learning norms.
Through creating and reflecting on these tangible glimpses of possible futures, we’ll explore not only what education might become — but what values, assumptions, and power dynamics are embedded within those possibilities.
🔑 Key Takeaways 🔑
Come to General Seminar and be prepared to walk away with tangible outputs and provocative questions that can inform strategic thinking institutionally, thoughts about product/service development, or institutional innovation in your own domain — whether you‘re in academia, education, tech, policy, or even design.
How Does It Work?
General Seminar offers an alternative to conventional one-way learning experiences like podcasts, TED Talks, or Masterclasses. This is a hands-on seminar where we are all actively engaged in collaborative sense-making by imagining into and creatively conjuring artifacts that represent the futures indicated by the topic. This is followed by sharing and discussions where you will be able to consider how today's emergent themes and cultural idioms may become tomorrow's normal-ordinary-everyday. The goal of General Seminar is to collectively imagine potential futures and derive actionable insights. This is a unique forum for creative stimulation and lateral thinking. General Seminar will invigorates your imagination, leveraging the remarkable efficacy of the imagination to turn ideas into tangible artifacts.
Run of Show
General Seminar is a 90-minute webinar-structured event designed to maximize engagement and insight. Conducted online (and live, in-person on special occasions!)
Participants receive a worksheet and access to the online edition of the Near Future Laboratory's Work Kit of Design Fiction
❥ Reception (5 minutes): Participants are welcomed and introduced to the topic.
❥ Design Fiction Breakout (25 minutes): Using the provided Worksheet, groups of 2-3 participants jump in the Near Future Laboratory's time machine and travel to the near future to engage in creative exploration, world building by 'finding' and imagining the kinds of artifacts one might stumble across in a possible near future world.
❥ Seminar (40 minutes): Facilitated group discussion to delve deeply into the topic.
❥ Wrap-Up (10 minutes): Summary and conclusions.
This immersive, collaborative format distinguishes General Seminar as a space for actionable creativity and innovative thought.