Explore the glossary map
Open a larger visual map of glossary categories and related terms without adding weight to the initial index load.
View glossary map
Hide glossary map
A
3 terms
Aggadic frame-break
A moment where a story admits an earlier version contradicts it, without resolving the contradiction.
Aggadic interface
An interactive experience built on story rather than law. Halacha tells you what to do, aggadah tells you a story about why it might matter, and an aggadic interface is the game or AR layer or hunt that lives entirely in that second lane.
Aliases:
aggadic-interface
Augmented aggadah
Layering speculative narrative onto a physical or textual Jewish space so a story becomes something one walks through.
B
2 terms
Backcasting
Defining a desirable future first, then working backward to identify the steps needed to achieve it.
Bal tashchit critique
Using the mitzvah against waste as a lens for creative work that consumes cultural material without giving back.
C
7 terms
Camp-scale futurism
Jewish futurist exercises and project builds designed for the size and chaos of a summer camp cohort.
Variations:
Camp scale futurism
Aliases:
Camp scale futurism
Campfire mesorah
Stories designed to be told imperfectly and differently each time, the way oral tradition spreads.
Chevruta prototyping
Paired design work with the intensity of chevruta study, directed at a prototype rather than a page of Gemara.
Chillul mesorah
Work that uses Jewish material correctly but empties it of communal accountability or seriousness.
Cosmogranate
A Cosmogranate is an exhibited speculative design art installation from Mike Wirth's Jewish futurism art series.
Aliases:
Rimon: The Cosmogranate
Creation as systems design
A foundational coordinate of Jewish futurism that views creative work through the lens of interconnected systems.
Creative middot
Ethical qualities or character traits applied to creative and design practice within Jewish futurism.
D
6 terms
Design thinking
A human-centered problem-solving methodology emphasizing empathy, ideation, prototyping, and iteration.
Diaspora futurism
Future-building without a geographic or institutional center, treating portability as the design brief rather than a workaround.
Aliases:
diaspora-futurism
Diasporic latency
The delay before an idea or ritual reaches Jewish communities far from major centers.
Diasporic worldbuilding
Speculative worldbuilding rerooted in diaspora, creating systems and lore for a future where Jews remain scattered, building, and present.
Divergent thinking
Generating multiple creative solutions by exploring possibilities before judging feasibility.
Variations:
divergent-thinking
Dor design
Asking whether a new ritual or tool will still make sense for a grandchild not yet born.
E
2 terms
Ethics as boundary of holiness
A foundational coordinate of Jewish futurist practice, informed by the Golem narrative's lessons about ethical creation.
Experiential learning
A learning approach emphasizing hands-on activity, concrete experience, and reflection.
F
3 terms
Flow state
Complete absorption in an activity where skill meets challenge and action and awareness merge.
Forestalgia
A yearning for an idealized future, rather than nostalgia's longing for the past.
Forward-looking responsibility
The ethical obligation to ask: What kind of world are we building next?
G
4 terms
Galut / Off-grid Judaism
The lived condition of practicing Jewishly in institutional isolation, using memory, improvisation, and what one can carry.
Synonyms:
Galut Judaism
Off-grid Judaism
Variations:
Galut Judaism
Off-grid Judaism
Off grid Judaism
Aliases:
Galut Judaism
Off-grid Judaism
Gematria code
Using gematria as a seed for generative or procedural design systems.
Golden calf design
Flashy, well-produced work that fills the anxiety-gap rather than being the real, substantial thing.
Grasshopper report design
Work that accurately names real obstacles but frames them so overwhelmingly it kills communal will.
H
2 terms
Hiddur olam
A framing that combines hiddur, beautification or enhancement, with olam, world, to imagine beautiful and livable futures.
Hitpashtut ha-gashmiyyut
A Hasidic concept meaning liberation from the material to make room for the spiritual.
Variations:
stripping of corporeality
Aliases:
stripping of corporeality
J
3 terms
Jewish Experience Design
A human-centered approach to designing Jewish encounters, rituals, learning environments, digital tools, and communal spaces, both a philosophy and an emerging professional practice.
Aliases:
JXD JED
Jewish futurism
The contemporary name for a long Jewish tradition of using memory, text, ritual, and values to imagine and build practical futures.
Judeofuturism
An alternative term emphasizing the infinite bounds of Jewishness while imagining desired Jewish futures.
Variations:
Judeo-futurism
Aliases:
Judeo-futurism
K
3 terms
Kavanah interface
An object or digital tool designed to produce intention and focus, not just function.
Variations:
kavvanah interface
Kehillah mesh
A decentralized model of Jewish community where connection spreads like a mesh network.
Klal-perat view
Checking the whole-system feel and the specific detail separately, then reconciling them.
Variations:
klal u'perat view
k'lal u'prat view
L
3 terms
Liminal space
The threshold condition of ambiguity and transformation during a rite of passage. The mikvah and mezuzah mark sacred transitions.
Variations:
liminal-space
Long-term thinking
An exercise Jewish futurism frames not as escapism or frivolity but as a core calling.
Ludic midrash
Game design as a form of midrash, using rules, mechanics, and win conditions as the interpretive act.
M
8 terms
Maggid engine
A storytelling structure built for oral delivery and adaptation, filled differently by each teller.
Variations:
magid engine
Manna-dependency design
A project that only works as long as its creator personally sustains it, with no structure to outlive them.
Marginalia futurism
Treating the margins of a traditional text page as a model for participatory annotation in future digital Jewish texts.
Merkabah vertigo
The mix of wonder and dread at the edge of a genuinely unknown Jewish future. Also: the ascension shudder.
Synonyms:
the ascension shudder
Variations:
Merkava vertigo
Merkavah vertigo
Mesorah-washing
Using the appearance of tradition to feel authentically Jewish, without real transmission behind it.
Mesorah mechanics
Game rules designed to help pass Jewish knowledge or values along. The goal is not only to entertain players. The game should help keep the chain of tradition going.
Metamodernism
A cultural paradigm marked by oscillation between sincerity and irony, hope and melancholy, and naivety and knowingness.
Minyan-scale design
Designing for the smallest workable Jewish community size, ten people, rather than a large institution.
Variations:
minyan scale design
N
1 term
Neon-infused aesthetics
A visual language in Jewish futurist art using bright technological imagery to explore Jewish themes.
P
2 terms
Playable prophecy
The idea that people should play a Jewish future before they are asked to believe in it. Vision should be playtested, not just delivered.
Prototyping peoplehood
Building small playable and breakable versions of possible Jewish futures, rather than only writing or lecturing about them.
R
2 terms
Retrocasting
Retrocasting is futures-thinking method that works backward from an imagined future, narrating how it plausibly came to be.
Variations:
retro-casting
Ritual innovation
Adapting and transforming Jewish rituals for contemporary contexts, including AI-integrated rituals and speculative narratives.
S
5 terms
Short-termism
Prioritizing immediate rewards over long-term consequences. Jewish futurism resists it through multigenerational responsibility.
Speculative chronology
Using speculative fiction, alternate histories, and future narratives to explore Jewish identity and possibility.
Speculative minhagim
A Jewish custom invented in a workshop and tested as a provisional prototype of practice.
Synonyms:
Speculative minhag
Variations:
Speculative minhag
Aliases:
Speculative minhag
Strange fire design
Sincere, almost-right creative innovation offered without proper communal grounding, which backfires.
Systems thinking
Examining relationships and interactions in a broader context to understand how components influence one another.
T
7 terms
Tel Atid
A symbolic future-building site combining archaeological connotations with forward orientation.
Aliases:
Hill of the Future
The diaspora-center paradox
Portability depends on shared texts and calendars that only work because they are centralized.
The joy-obligation paradox
Simcha is commanded, not just encouraged. Can obligated joy still be authentic?
The paradox of the chosen archive
Digitizing the Jewish canon democratizes access while curation inevitably privileges some texts.
The Sinai-sandbox paradox
A fixed, unrepeatable foundation generating infinite reinterpretation ever since.
Tikkun texture
Using tactile, sensory material design to physically embody the idea of repair.
Tower without a name design
Work whose real goal is the maker's personal branding, dressed up as communal or spiritual purpose.
U
2 terms
Untranslatable UX
Keeping certain Hebrew or Yiddish words untranslated in an interface to protect meaning.
UX Design
An approach focused on optimizing user interactions with products and services within connected systems.
Synonyms:
User Experience Design
Variations:
UX design
User experience design
Abbreviations:
UX
Aliases:
User Experience Design
V
2 terms
Vidui checkpoint
Before any fix or v2, a team must state exactly what failed and why.
Variations:
viduy checkpoint
Vidui monologue
A character's spoken, first-person confession scene, modeled on the Yom Kippur vidui.
Variations:
viduy monologue
Y
2 terms
Yiddish futurism
A historical Yiddish avant-garde movement of the 1910s and 1920s, not a synonym for Jewish futurism.
Yovel thinking
Asking whether a plan or institution still serves people fairly after fifty years, not only five.
Variations:
jubilee thinking