This post also appears at www.designfictiondaily.com

So, there I was, in a timeline where you don't hit the books until your hair starts graying. Found this artifact in a bustling campus café, surrounded by folks old enough to be empty nest parents, all cramming for exams. It's a world where the traditional college-kid age is now the "get a job, start a family" phase. You only hit the university scene when you've got a couple of decades of real-life under your belt.

Here's the deal: longevity is a thing and life expectancy's a cool 100 years. So, why rush into a career at 22? Instead, these folks work, live a little, save up, and then dive into higher education. They're looking at careers that'll last half a century, post-graduation.

Makes our timeline's rush into college straight out of high school look like a sprint. These folks treat it more like a marathon, with a pit stop for some real-world experience. Imagine bringing that level of maturity and life experience into a freshman lecture hall.

Here’s a peek behind the curtain of today’s design fiction for my paid subs. There are links to GPT conversations below that you do not need an OpenAI account to view.

Before I continue, thank you for your support. I hope you find this behind-the-scenes peek of value.

After a full day of meetings and some dinner I needed to crank out a post … post-haste. With all the longevity hack videos YouTube’s been feeding me, I got to thinking about what a world where people living to 100 years might look like. So I fired up my Futures Wheel Explorer GPT (account is needed to use the GPT) and started exploring next order effects on the topic (no account needed to view this convo).

With my cursor acting like a divining rod, I cherry picked the next order effect, leading me to follow the education breadcrumb trail for about 5 volleys. In my head I had conjured this idea of people not starting university until their 40s, allowing them to work, live a little and even raise a family to adulthood and only starting college when their kids leave high school. The last prompt in my conversation was to steer the conversation into this direction that I was feeling.

This is where I took some information from the Future Wheel session and pasted it into a GPT I’ve been working on called DFD Concept Helper, a tool that will come up with some design fiction ideas trained on a dataset of archetypes. A link to the full conversation can be seen here. You’ll notice that it goes off the rails after the first idea, but I want to give you an idea of how the sausage is made and how messy it can get.

Lastly, I took some information it gave me and pasted into yet another GPT I created called Artefact Packager v2. It is trained to visualize products and artifacts with surrounding environments.

ChatGPT doesn’t let you share chats with images, so here’s a screengrab of what that looks like.

As you can see, the text is wonky, so I brought it into Photoshop to re-typeset and adjust the aspect ratio to a more cinematic 2.35:9 with Adobe’s Generative Expand feature.

In about an hour I was ready to drag it all into Substack and write the post. Total time for today’s post including this behind-the-scenes stuff was 95 minutes.