Future Text Lab

This session centered on a live demonstration of Origami Text, a peer-to-peer communication experiment in which each message is a self-describing, plain-text JSON file carrying Visual-Meta-style metadata, built almost through conversational "vibe coding" with Claude acting as a client inside Xcode. The host argued that the threshold for creating serious, robust applications has collapsed to a few hundred pounds of tokens, turning software itself into "wet clay" the community can reshape mid-conversation, and invited participants to propose views and interactions that were then built live during the call. Discussion ranged across what such a system offers beyond existing messaging tools, the history and pitfalls of link types and federated systems, local-first security realities, identity and metadata challenges, ZigZag and other hypertext lineages, and what all of this means for XR knowledge spaces. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/11/13-july/

This session explored what the fundamental elements of a spatial knowledge environment should be, launched by an AI-assisted inquiry into neuroscience and psychology which concluded that connections, not objects, are the primary units of thought. The conversation wove through the reconstructive nature of memory, the failure of education systems to teach thinking rather than conformity, a sustained debate over whether original ideas exist, the problem of provenance and intellectual property for transclusion, and how documents might be restructured, connected, and lived in within AR environments such as visionOS. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/06/6-july-2026/

This session carried the month's figure-and-ground theme into a concrete new use case, prompted by a first-time participant from the world of corporate law: the headset as a space for contested negotiation and dispute resolution. 

The working premise, carried over from the previous week, is that what distinguishes headset work is not "knowledge work" but contested synthesis — holding a quantity of not-yet-structured material in space and arguing it into shape. Around that spine the group examined what it means to lay out two positions spatially, move issues between open and resolved, and let an AI act inside the room rather than only answer from outside it. Running alongside were the perceptual grounding for the theme — how foveal and peripheral vision should govern what a node shows — the pedagogy of making a learner's thinking visible through their AI chat logs, and a steady caution that a visual, persuasive medium is believed too easily. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/23/29-june-26/

This session deepened the group’s figure-and-ground thread into a genuine reframing: the difficulty of showing relationships in a 360-degree knowledge space is not a problem of where to route a connective line, but a problem of signification — of how out-of-view information can keep doing the work that knowledge-in-the-world is supposed to do. 

Drawing on Don Norman’s affordances and signifiers, Donella Meadows’ systems thinking, and the founding choices of hypertext, the conversation worked through what a node should reveal when closed, how to distinguish an author’s corpus from collaborations and shared topics, the multisensory and dispositional dimensions of perception, and the constraints that XR swaps in rather than removes. Threaded throughout was a reflection on human–machine co-evolution, sharpened by Mazlish’s fourth discontinuity, alongside a running live demonstration of one AI briefing another to render the session’s own song and quotations into image and video. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/22/22-june-2026/

This session continued the month's theme of figure and ground applied to reading and thinking in XR: when potentially every digital document is available at once, how do we decide what to bring forward and what to leave as background? Using a long, heavily structured online essay as a shared test case, the group worked across three registers at once — the practical question of how such a piece might be re-presented spatially, the physiological limits of human reading, and the deeper conceptual question of how to make the process of thinking visible rather than only its finished products. Running underneath was a candid thread about the present state of headset adoption and the everyday frictions that decide whether anyone bothers to put one on. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/22/22-june-2026/

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/

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/

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

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/

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/