Jul 5, 2021 5 min read

2021 w28: a home for your daily creativity and well-being

There’s a lot of new ideas and questions floating around our minds and it seems as though things are kind of building up to a new set of experiments . There’s many new unknowns to explore and seemingly a lot of new potential as well.

Here’s a few notes on Futureland:

1 - A new (continually evolving) home page.

There’s been many new improvements to Futureland over the past few weeks but one of the more significant ones is a redesigned home page. We want to give new visitors a sense of being immediately within the tool and space of Futureland. Once you visit futureland.tv, the first thing you see is a grid of users and journals that you can explore. Clicking any user or journal takes you deeper into Futureland. The side bar - a defining characteristic of our interface - opens on the homepage and new visitors interact with it as part of creating an account. We hope this helps familiarize new users with our interfaces early on. There’s a simple explanation of Futureland at the bottom of the screen and it can be dismissed. This means the home page is almost entirely focused on encouraging new visitors to explore the artists and experiments on Futureland. There’s always more for us to build on, but all of this seems like we’re moving in the right direction. Perhaps that’s ultimately the only thing that matters.

⟡

2 - NYC in July and new experiments in filmmaking

Futureland has achieved some new level of stability in that new people who show up seem to understand and experiment with it more immediately than any other point in its existence. It seems we can attribute this to all of the design work we have been doing over the past few months. Things are starting to tune in. It seems natural now to start exploring how we might share Futureland with others to see what we can learn. It also seems like figuring out how to do this in a way that is authentic (or pure) requires some experimentation. I asked our community and my closest friends for advice and a common suggestion was “run some experiments with filmmaking”. I’m opening up to this and letting things unravel now. There’s many different technologies, problem sets, and sub-cultures that I’m deeply curious about. Can these subjects be explored in a way that makes sense for Futureland and its community? How might we explore them in an immersive way? How might we bend formats to more accurately capture the essence of something? Can we blend things like documentary, science fiction, surrealism, new journalism, music and animation? What happens if we just start making something?

I’ll be in NYC as of July 17 to begin running experiments with this. I’m hoping to capture audio and video of various conversations and then see how the captured materials naturally order themselves into some type of film(s). Perhaps while working out how to synthesize the materials, I can distribute the conversations I’m having as a podcast.

If you want to hang out while I’m in NYC or if you know anyone that I should talk to, please reply to this email and let’s figure it out 💕

⟡

3 - Futureland Community Sessions

We have started experimenting with something we call Community Sessions. They are little virtual gatherings where we take time to explore the life, process and experimentation of various individuals on Futureland. Our latest was titled, Community Session #3 with @mintie. He's an economist with a background in behavioural and experimental economics. He has a daily journal on Futureland titled, applied statistics which features quick analyses across a wide ranging set of subjects including crime statistics, poverty, optical illusions on animals, diversity, behavioural shifts after traumatic events and on. It was an engaging discussion and it revealed some of the deeper insights he's exploring about himself.

⟡

It’s difficult to capture the extent of tweaks that have happened over the past few weeks, but you can get a sense of them in this journal: https://futureland.tv/vin/futureland-design. Community feedback has become the foundation of our design process and this philosophy seems to grow and expand each day. In collaboration with our community, we’ve improved spacing everywhere, enhanced the sidebar, improved the audio player, improved bookmarked entries, highlighted new users, added new visual handling for emoji based entries, added a little description of Futureland for new users on permalink entries, made refinements to user profiles and many other tweaks and fixes. It seems the rate of community feedback is increasing and we’re figuring out how to collect, discuss and synthesize this feedback into material improvements on a weekly basis.

⟡

5 - (upcoming) Scheduled Journals

A new functionality titled Scheduled Journals is something our community is very excited about right now. Scheduled Journals allows anyone to experiment with new journal cadences on Futureland outside of just Daily ones while still preserving the light weight flow state feelings of Futureland that we love. With Scheduled Journals you can tell a journal to appear on Futureland on specific days like Monday and Tuesday or tell a journal to appear at any cadence you want like every 2 days, 14 days, 30 days, 45 days, or something like every 101 days. This really opens up the range of experimentation that can happen on Futureland.

⟡⟡⟡

Now a few journals to visit:

@kristina is a newer contributor to Futureland. Her daily journals include, Balcony Diary, Getting dressed, Meditation, Mini 'tate, Movement practice, Work reflection and Waking.

Vietnam Internship by @pixouls is a great daily read. The journal is described as “a daily journal for recording my experiences as an intern based in the US working virtually with a grassroots org in Vietnam”. Each entry is very dynamic and engaging and features continual links to a divergent set of interesting resources.

@simon is also a newer contributor to Futureland. His daily journals include, tatin’, Word Splurge, and GO OUTSIDE. He recently published a little tune he made in a journal titled MAKIN MUSIC and it's pretty neat: https://futureland.tv/simon/entry/81814

ty for everything <3

vin

We’re distilling our experiences on Futureland (FL) into (mostly) weekly emails. If you ever want to chat or hang out, just reply to this email. Your input helps a lot on independent projects like this. 🌀

And if you're curious about how you can use Futureland, watch this video on using it to design a morning routine. 🌞