Going online (wk 48/2025)
Online workshops; finding books in space with situated memory; headlessness, 3D-printed boats, AI energy usage, climate models, mendacity.
Hello friends,
Back now in Singapore, where it’s surprisingly cool and not unbearably humid.
Last week in Marseille, I wanted a book that I knew was in one of the dozens of boxes scattered around the apartment. (Jasper Morrison’s The Good Life.) I half-remembered last seeing that narrow, pale blue, clothbound spine in a corner of a green and brown carton sitting on tomettes. The tile narrowed it to two rooms, and the carton colour to one of maybe three boxes. This was sense memory combined with spatial memory—an ordinary act of retrieval that depends on our evolved adaptation to working in 3D space.
This kind of situated memory comes naturally in physical environments but is nearly impossible to replicate online. Virtual whiteboards try to mimic navigable physical space, but so far almost all of them do it terribly. VR and AR will eventually solve some of these problems, but the current implementations aren’t good enough yet.
The affordances and constraints of physical vs. virtual space have been on my mind because I recently redesigned—from the ground up—a strategy workshop I’ve run in person for years. Yesterday at 6am, I delivered a shortened, first fully online version for a team in Australia.
The redesign reinforced my growing belief that online workshops can’t simply be in-person workshops transposed to Zoom. Doing them well online requires rethinking the workshop and interaction mechanisms entirely, to both work around the disadvantages of not being in the same physical space and also exploit the technical and interaction possibilities that working online affords. I no longer especially want to focus on making online workshops tolerable substitutes for in-person ones. I’m now much more focused on designing online workshops that are worth doing because they’re online.
This week’s writing is about some preliminary answers I’ve come up with, about what we lose when we work online (spatial memory, body language, the low friction of moving physical objects), but also what we gain (high-speed elicitation, comprehensive documentation, computational analysis of collective thinking).
Writing
Making online workshops great … from the ground up. Online workshops rarely work well, and we usually do them mostly because an in-person workshop would be too expensive/infeasible. This is the wrong way to frame the problem. The right way is to ask how to redesign online workshops from the ground up to be effective not in spite of but because they’re online. Virtual spaces destroy our spatial navigation abilities and make reading participants nearly impossible, but they also enable transformative capabilities: high-speed elicitation, comprehensive documentation, and real-time machine-supported analysis of collective thinking that’s essentially impossible with walls of paper post-its. After years of refusing to run workshops online, I’ve spent the last few months fundamentally redesigning my approach from the ground up—discrete virtual spaces, explicit participation scaffolding, and computational tools that support rather than replace human judgment. The mindset shift we need is for workshop design to start thinking about online spaces as being fundamentally different from meatspaces, and especially in thinking about designing for their distinctive advantages. (28 November, 2025.)
Elsewhere
“Speaking outside his chateau in France, former Brexit Party and UKIP MEP Coburn answered ‘no’ when a BBC journalist asked him whether he had ever been paid to give a speech to promote pro-Russian campaigners.”
See you next time,
VT
