After seeing a video from Gaza of Dr. Ali Alhaj Salem, standing over incubators without electricity, without formula, without breast milk, I’ve thought a lot about NICUs, how they differ, and how they reflect on humanity.

Fourteen years ago, my son was born three months early. He spent the first stretch of his life inside a plastic box, kept alive by machines, wires, and a team of people, backed by a society that imagined him as a part of its own. It was terrifying. And miraculous.

The babies in Gaza are just as premature. Just as fragile. Just as worthy of care.

The New York Times published my essay I wrote about that unbearable contrast:
A Tale of Two NICUs (and Haaretz translated and published it in Hebrew)

It’s about my son, and it’s about Dr. Salem’s patients. It’s about who we see as “ours,” and who we learn to see as expendable. It’s about what happens when societies imagine themselves narrowly—and what it takes to imagine something else.

If you read it, thank you. If you feel something from it, I hope you’ll share it.
We don’t get to choose where babies are born. But we can do something about the kind of world they’re born into.

—Mushon

Illustration by Vartika Sharma

It comes from a place of deep frustration—with the violence, with the paralysis, with how easy it’s become to accept the unacceptable. We’re stuck in survival mode. Fight, flight, freeze. Again and again.

This isn’t just about Israel and Gaza, though that’s where I’m writing from. It’s about the larger collapse of political imagination—our shrinking ability to see beyond the current horror, to believe something else is even possible.

I don’t have the answers. But I am looking for them, and I needed to write this down.
If you’ve also been feeling this stuck, this helpless—maybe it’s time we start unlearning it, together.

Thanks for reading.
—Mushon

The Futures Map is nonlinear. It’s organized not by time, but by resonance—emotional, thematic, spatial. It evolves with every contribution, forming constellations of hope, contradiction, and shared concern. These aren’t complete stories. They’re peepholes, sparks, and landmarks—meant to guide us through the fog of the present.

This is not speculative fiction from a safe distance. Many contributors have lost loved ones. These screenshots come from inside the burn zone, where imagining the future is itself an act of resistance.

The map was developed together with Adam Kariv and with support from the Albi fund and A Land For All—Two States One Homeland. The map was debuted in the Peoples Peace Summit in Jerusalem and later at the Imagining Futures exhibition in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.

Visit the map. Drift through it. Add your own screenshot. And above all, ask:
What room is there for me in your future?

The installation Imagining Futures. The power of futures thinking in uncertain times explores how people, in times of crisis, can and dare to imagine different futures – and what that can mean for them. 

The installation presents several people who live in the Netherlands and have family in Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank. They took part in a ‘futures thinking’ workshop in Amsterdam led by Israeli designer and peace activist Mushon Zer-Aviv and Palestinian Dutch political scientist Dana Rentenaar. During the workshop, they imagined different futures. Futures they hope for, and futures they fear. Their stories, the process they went through, and the tangible results from the workshop, are presented in the installation, both visually and audibly. 

Create your own images from the future 

What changes in the world affect people’s lives? And how do they shape our ideas about the future? In the interactive part of Imagining Futures, we invite you to create your own ‘images from the future’ and add them to the installation. You can do this yourself with the instructions provided, with help from our staff members, or by taking part in a guided workshop.  

Futures thinking as an act of hope 

Mushon Zer-Aviv developed his workshop shortly after the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas. Futures thinking, imagining various possible (and impossible) futures, can shift our perception of the present. It helps us make choices in the here and now, and offers hope and inspiration for shaping our future.   

The project collects speculative glimpses into possible futures—captured as if from social media, protest signs, maps, chats, or interfaces. Not predictions, but provocations. Not a timeline, but a terrain of anticipation.

These screenshots, submitted by workshop participants, exhibition visitors, and co-creators, are arranged not chronologically but relationally—by emotional resonance, thematic alignment, spatial metaphor. Together, they form the Futures Map, a living interface for political imagination.

Because the future doesn’t arrive as a headline. It seeps in through the margins, in how we see, name, and locate what might still be possible.

Read the essay: Future Screenshots

You know the move — that frantic, repeated tapping on a button or link that just won’t do what it promised to. It might seem like a small moment, a minor user error, a frustration spike. But when you zoom in, rage clicks reveal something deeper — a moment when the interface breaks its promise, and the user momentarily loses their grip on control, meaning, and trust.

I call them microdoses of pure horror. They expose the uncanny, the manipulative, and sometimes the downright broken assumptions coded into our digital environments. They’re a symptom, but also a signal — pointing to hidden power dynamics, broken affordances, and the darker corners of our attention economies.

It’s not just about better UX. It’s about reckoning with what our interfaces do to us when they stop working — or work too well in the wrong direction.

Read the full piece here:
Rage clicks are microdoses of pure horror

This is our darkest hour, for me, for my children and for my loved ones. We, Israelis and Palestinians who believe in a shared equal society are grieving, we are violently attacked by the warmongers on both sides, and we are rejected by our international allies for not turning our backs against each other. We need your help, not through short-sighted one-sided empathy, but through sincere, stubborn and hopeful compassion. Progressive politics is rightfully demanding to think beyond binaries. And while this non-binary “YES, AND” may be harder and more tasking, it is urgently required

— Read the full article on Medium (or in Hebrew at Haaretz)

In the past few years, we’ve been experiencing a rough fallout from our prolonged honeymoon with social media. The imminent decline of Facebook and the chaos in Twitter opened the appetite for something different. Many of us turned our backs on the X and launched into a promiscuous rebounding period with multiple partners (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, even LinkedIn…). Much has been written against big tech and the social dilemma, in praise of decentralized and open source infrastructures, and more recently about the inevitable growing pains of new emerging networks. However, the following words will attempt to address the elephant in the room…

The feed.

I was excited to return to Re:publica to talk about why I think we’ve been optimizing technology towards teleportation. Check out the video documentation and the talk description:

Your GPS app directs you, turn-by-turn, on the quickest route from A to B. At the same time, it also defines time as the single, non-exchangeable currency for evaluating the cost of the journey. To do so, the app flattens the multi-dimensional complexities of the world into a 2-dimensional map, and then further condenses them into a 1-dimensional route, optimized for the ultimate elimination of time and space down to 0-dimensions – effectively, teleportation. The talk highlights teleportation’s depiction in an 80’s horror classic, its echoes in the current rush towards automation, and its role in the untimely death of the Waze Carpool service. As an early designer of Waze maps, the speaker argues that user-centered-design has segmented us into isolated, self-driving boxes going nowhere fast. The answer, he posits, may be found in a return to mapping, not as a replacement for the territory, but as an ongoing collaborative process for sensing our paths forward and navigating our every turn-by-turn towards better futures.

from the talk description

I was super excited to keynote RISD & Brown’s 2022 Better World X Design conference this year and to present my Friction & Flow research on stage for the first time. In the talk I explore many of the topics I am currently researching towards a book. I expand on interaction topics like friction, flow, affordance, signifier and rage clicks to discuss change, civic action and political imagination bringing together lessons from both design, futures studies and complexity science. I would love for you to check it out and offer some constructive friction to my writing flow. Thanks!