FROM: The Near Future Laboratory SUBJECT: 2021 — A Year In A List The Near Future Laboratory isn’t a ‘normal’ organization by any means — we’re a distributed network of accomplished practitioners based in five different cities in California, Mexico, Switzerland and Spain. We each have our own personal interests…

(The following is Issue 23 of my Design Fiction Newsletter. Please subscribe here: https://buttondown.email/designfiction) 1. I heard the most simple and resonant description of integrity the other day. 2. It was so resonant, at least to the matrix of my own consciousness at that moment, that I played it over probably…

This is republished from Issue 20 of the Design Fiction Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here: https://buttondown.email/designfiction and that way get the dispatches freshly baked in your inbox. For the past years, the outsized narrative of DAO [Decentralized Autonomous Organization] as an alternative to venture capital dims the…

This is a re-syndication of The Design Fiction Newsletter 002. If you like this, why not subscribe? And if you believe in supporting good, meaty, thoughtful content like this, why not become a Patron on, you know — Near Future Laboratory Patreon. Your support would be most appreciated! …

This is a re-post of Issue One of my Design Fiction Newsletter. You can subscribe here to receive each issue: https://buttondown.email/designfiction One — The Future As An Email Attachment Have you ever gotten one of these emails? Where the future is zipped up into a PowerPoint deck and then sent around in an email with the expectation that…

I’ve been struggling these months trying to write another of the required Pitch Decks you have to put together when you’re in a funding round. My eyes were glazing over looking at lots of my old pitch decks trying to figure out how best to represent the Vision I had. …

You know those Org Charts you see for companies? The ones with boxes with names and titles and arrows and lines connecting employees and managers? I could draw one for Omata. It’d be pretty simple. Lots of boxes, lots of roles, but just two names, Julian and Cary. One or…

We’re a tiny operation here at Omata. But that doesn’t stop us from keeping true to the values and vision I’ve had for Omata since Day 0, December 31, 2014. It takes a particular kind of persistence and grit and perserverance to continue doing what we do with only two people around. The value in this kind of gritty operation is that we’ve built a remarkably rich connection to our fans and customers. We care about them deeply and we enjoy the connections we’re able to establish.

Five years ago I started this company to reconsider what a bicycle computer could be. It was as much a thought experiment as it was an idea for a product. The design brief was roughly this: if there was a future in which digital devices were designed to be…