April '26

Thinking Music

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

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/ [https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/25/25-may-2026/]

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/]