Near Future Podcast

Tom and Jonny reflect on their live workshop at Product Unleashed in London, explore the history of designers building their own tools, and dig into how AI can be used as a counterbalance to your own working style — not just an amplifier.ChaptersBuilding a Design Tool in 15 Minutes at Product UnleashedTom and Jonny recap the workshop they ran at Product Unleashed, where they built retro design tools (Etch A Sketch, MS Paint) live in front of an audience — twice. They discuss how the challenge evolved, why they pivoted from serious tools to fun ones, and how they got the final result live on the internet using a QR code.Why Designers Building Their Own Tools MattersJonny shares the narrative from the workshop's opening slides — a Gutenberg-moment argument for why designers are now able to build hyper-personalized tools for the first time, referencing Adobe, Figma, and the growing landscape of AI-native design tools.Historical Examples: Eames, Lennon & the Apple CalculatorTom walks through three historical examples of makers building tools to unlock their own creativity: Chris Espinoza's Calculator Construction Set for Steve Jobs, Ken Townsend inventing automatic double tracking for John Lennon, and Charles and Ray Eames creating the Kazam machine to bend plywood into new furniture forms.The Value of Craft in the Age of AIJonny reflects on Karri Saaranen (founder of Linear) and his view that design is the thinking — and there's no shortcut to it. The conversation explores whether something made quickly can ever be truly iconic, and why craft still has real, felt value even as AI capabilities grow.AI as Amplifier or Counterbalance: Knowing Your Working StyleTom introduces the idea that AI shouldn't just universally amplify — for some people (perfectionists who stall), it should act as a counterbalance, nudging them to ship. For others (fast movers who skip deliberation), the opposite. Both share personal examples of how they've tuned their own AI workflows around their personality types.Ooda: Instantly Sharing Internal PrototypesJonny shares an update on Ooda, his tool that lets teams publish prototypes, tools, and documents to a private, secure link in seconds — just by asking Claude. He explains the pivot from "run your dev server in the cloud" to "don't let your team's work disappear," and why the response from a handful of people last week convinced him the problem is real.Building a Calculator with a 5-Year-OldTom shares a heartwarming weekend story of building a calculator with his five-year-old son Waltie — complete with a car button, a horse button, and a Lego-themed interface — and reflects on what it means to grow up in an era where building software is as natural as playing. Jonny draws parallels to how touchscreens changed children's expectations of interaction.(00:00) - Episode #3: (00:04) - Building a Design Tool in 15 Minutes at Product Unleashed (07:45) - Why Designers Building Their Own Tools Matters (12:13) - Historical Examples: Eames, Lennon & the Apple Calculator (19:57) - The Value of Craft in the Age of AI (22:45) - AI as Amplifier or Counterbalance: Knowing Your Working Style (34:32) - Ooda: Instantly Sharing Internal Prototypes (43:59) - Building a Calculator with a 5-Year-Old Find us at nearfuture.worksClick here to view the episode transcript.

Tom and Jonny dig into the outcomes of Tom's Mostly Working event featuring James Storer from Monzo, unpacking how leading design teams are using AI not to ship faster, but to learn faster — and why the language of "design vs. product" is getting in the way. They get into the state of Figma: is it losing its grip on the design workflow, or is it actually thriving? And they draw an unexpected parallel to the smartphone camera era to ask whether AI will democratise design the same way. Plus: upcoming events, what they're each building, and some honest holiday parenting failure.0:04 — Mostly Working: AI in Design at Monzo — Tom recaps the event with James Storer, prototyping at Monzo, and why the team focuses on learning speed over shipping speed6:11 — Three Use Cases for AI in Design Workflows — Jonny breaks down the emerging buckets: shipping production code, faster prototyping, and building internal tools13:12 — Is Figma Losing Its Grip? — Jonny's spicy take on Figma overreaching, seat cancellation stats from a 90-person design org, and the Adobe comparison18:17 — Figma's Growth vs. The Designer Exodus — Two things can be true: enterprise growth numbers and a slow professional exodus21:29 — The Smartphone Camera Analogy — Did smartphones kill professional photography? And will AI do the same to design?25:52 — Upcoming Events: Berlin, Shoreditch & Brighton — Jonny's "Tools That Shape Us" talk at Hatch Berlin (Sep 18), the live build session at Product Unleashed Shoreditch, and the Brighton workshop35:37 — What We're Building — Jonny's prototype hosting tool, a Notion CRM, and Tom's AI-powered family holiday journal ideaFind us at nearfuture.worksClick here to view the episode transcript.

Near Future Podcast – Pilot EpisodeWelcome to the Near Future Podcast, where Tom and Jonny explore what they're building, learning, and experimenting with as AI reshapes how we work.In this episode:Agentic Murder MysteryJonny walks through his experiment building a six-agent murder mystery game using NanoClaw. He created a cast of AI suspects — each with their own secrets, personalities, and email inboxes — and ran a live session with a group of exited startup founders. The conversation covers what makes agents distinct from standard LLMs (triggers, tools, memory, collaboration), and the surprisingly playful emergent behaviour that unfolded when participants tried to interrogate and social-engineer the AI suspects.The Near Future Logo InstrumentTom shares his experiment turning the Near Future logo into an interactive, playable design tool — built in Claude Code — that generates ambient generative music as the logo animates. The conversation explores what it means to treat a brand asset as a toy, and how ephemeral software experiments fuel deeper craft practice.Craft, Design, and What LastsJonny reflects on receiving his long-awaited Poem Clock — a piece of hardware by Matt Webb that displays AI-generated rhyming couplets telling the time — as a lens for thinking about what makes design feel timeless. The duo discuss Dieter Rams' principles, the difference between craft as polish vs. craft as practice, and what that means for designers navigating the AI era.Hiring Designers in the Age of AITom shares observations from a recent head of design hiring process — how AI is adding noise on both sides, what strong portfolios look like right now, and the balance between deep foundations and pushing the frontier.Design Engineering & the Future of the Design TeamA candid discussion on whether every designer needs to become a design engineer, the role of different archetypes within a team, and how to close the gap between Figma and code without putting everyone in an IDE.Tools We're Excited AboutTom: Flora AI (visual asset generation with reference images), Notion's new agent capabilitiesJonny: UK-built sovereign design tools — Dawn Labs, Superhands, and Dessn(00:00) - Pilot episode (00:04) - Introduction (01:07) - Agentic Murder Mystery (15:17) - The Near Future Logo Instrument (22:27) - Craft, Design & What Lasts (29:03) - Hiring Designers in the Age of AI (33:30) - Design Engineering & the Future of Design Teams (45:56) - Tools We're Excited About Find us at nearfuture.works