Future Text Lab

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/ [https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/09/11-may-2026/]

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/ [https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/28/6-may-2026/]

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/ [https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/02/millard-1-may-2026/]

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.

27 April '26

This session explored the intersection of AI in education, the crisis of academic publishing and document ownership, and the question of what a future-proof knowledge document format might look like. The conversation moved from how AI levels the playing field for students and reshapes teaching toward mastery-based learning, through the social and technical failings of current web and publishing infrastructure — siloed libraries, broken hyperlinks, pay-to-publish incentives — and arrived at a substantive design discussion about whether ePub, a new format, or enriched HTML could serve as the foundation for ownable, citable, shareable units of knowledge in a post-PDF world. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/27/27-april-26/ [https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/27/27-april-26/]