Future Text Lab

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Weekly podcast on the future of text from https://futuretextlab.info

há 16 h

8 June '26

This wide-ranging session, held in the hours before Apple‘s Worldwide Developer Conference, circled around a single underlying question: what is the right relationship between a person, their knowledge, and a designed space — physical or in XR. Conversation moved fluidly between flow states and active engagement, the perceptual default of the human visual system, contested histories and multiple narratives, immersive environments as persuasive “atmospheres,” and the craft of guiding rather than overwhelming a reader. A live demonstration of marked-text “sculpting” in Author grounded the more philosophical threads, while recurring touchstones — the Vatican, Rome, Kashmir, and Stewart Brand‘s How Buildings Learn — kept returning the group to how spaces shape understanding. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/08/8-june-26/

3 min
há 16 h

1 June '26

This session, framed around the theme of "figure and ground" (document versus workspace), explored how authoring in spatial computing should handle the vast surrounding context — references, notes, citations, and AI-generated material — that informs a piece of writing but never fully enters the final product. The conversation moved through the history of information artifacts (from cuneiform clay bulla to Warburg's wall panels to Robert Caro's articles on the wall), the physical and perceptual constraints of headset interaction, and the deeper question of how to represent "knowledge objects" in XR once a writer has decided how they relate. A recurring undercurrent was the search for the right name for this surrounding space, alongside a sustained reflection on writing as the work of building, escaping, and controlling one's own frames. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/27/1st-of-june-2026/

1 min
26 de mai.

Thinking Music

Introduction to the Thinking Music aspect of The Future Text Lab.

3 min
25 de mai.

25 May '26

This session centred on the evolving spatial interface of Author for visionOS, using Douglas Engelbart's 1962 paper as a large-scale test document. The conversation moved from concrete design questions — how section cards should look, how selection states should be rendered, how visual differentiation by category or search could work in an immersive space — into a deeper conceptual inquiry about the nature of supplementary knowledge in digital documents. The group explored what endnotes, footnotes, and annotations become when freed from the constraints of paper, seeking both a functional model and appropriate terminology for "the extra stuff" that surrounds a primary text when it inhabits three-dimensional space. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/25/25-may-2026/

4 min
11 de mai.

11 May '26

The session centred on a guest presentation by Mohit Yadav exploring how meaning arises through dynamic assemblages of known and unknown elements during encounters with the world, arguing that current tools fail to intervene at the moment of interaction and that a new category of "navigational systems" is needed to bring latent personal resources into active contact with present experience. The ensuing discussion wove together knowledge graph visualization, the cognitive role of fuzziness and analogy, the spectrum from precise definition to deliberate conceptual blurring, and the limits of graph-and-node metaphors when modelling genuine intellectual work. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/09/11-may-2026/

6 min
4 de mai.

4 May '26

This session brought together regular members and two newcomers — one joining from Mumbai, another from Moscow — for a wide-ranging exploration that moved from a live demonstration of Author on macOS and Apple Vision Pro, through a proposal for a simplified EPUB publishing format called Origami Text, and into a deep theoretical exchange on cognitive load, adaptive interfaces, and the relationship between knowledge, context, and spatial computing. The demonstration showed concept extraction, spatial node interaction, focus/unfocus gestures, and saved views in XR, while the format discussion examined how to make scholarly documents more accessible to both humans and AI by stripping EPUB back to semantic essentials and enriching it with structured metadata. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/28/6-may-2026/

5 min
2 de mai.

1 May '26

Dave Millard is working hands-on in the Map view, testing node selection, movement, layout, and spatial organization. The conversation moves from immediate UX feedback into a deeper discussion about how AI should be integrated into the spatial workspace. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/02/millard-1-may-2026/

6 min
2 de mai.

April '26

Across the four sessions of April 2026, the Future Text Lab circled a persistent and sharpening question: what, precisely, would compel someone to put on a headset and do serious knowledge work? The month opened with Frode Hegland's "Best of Both Worlds" presentation on foldable knowledge nodes in visionOS and progressed through a framework distinguishing "core" reading/writing space from "contextual" spatial surrounds, a confrontation with the Engelbart-scale question of whether the group is stuck designing mice without knowing what the mouse is for, and a concluding examination of document ownership, citation infrastructure, and the potential of ePub as a future scholarly container. A new participant, Tim Brookes of the Endangered Alphabets Project, introduced the theme of embodiment and manual skill in relation to digital abstraction. Throughout the month, generative writing — writing to discover rather than to transcribe — served as the conceptual spine connecting flat-screen authoring, spatial interaction, and AI-assisted research.

5 min

Weekly podcast on the future of text from https://futuretextlab.info

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