Hi, My name is Chris Harman. I'm a civil engineer who spends his working hours focused on digital engineering, design transformation, and design technology for infrastructure projects.
I support and set delivery policy and digital direction for a full range of design disciplines in the AEC market, and when I'm lucky I still get to act as a BIM/Information/Delivery Director on projects and deliveries where the client requirements or delivery environments are complex. I graduated from Auburn University in 2003 and early in my career I spent 7-years living and working in London, United Kingdom. While there I was fortunate enough to work on many large, global projects and that experience has served me well later in my career.
This blog is a mix of my current musings on civil engineering, digital delivery, BIM, and public infrastructure inter-mixed with a science-fiction project I have been working my brain through. The science fiction centers around a speculative thought experiment exploring near-future infrastructure, AI-led civil engineering, and the ethical tension between optimization and society.
It began with me shooting ideas back and forth with a modern day AI (referred to throughout this blog as AI Now or, AIN) and how super intelligences might have agency in the future. Most of it centers around a future entity I call the "Autonomous Infrastructure Collective, or "AIC".
"The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine."
Core Questions
What happens when engineers hand over the planning and design of the built environment to super intelligent agents?
What is lost when design becomes too efficient, and society is shaped by increasingly larger spheres of design criterias?
Project Overview
Imponderable Bloom is a speculative design fiction project, set in a near-future world where autonomous systems govern much of the built environment. Through fictional memos, internal audits, leaked policy briefings, and reflective commentary, it follows the rise of the Autonomous Infrastructure Collective ("AIC")--a distributed, non-human entity entrusted with managing cities, corridors, and climate responses at planetary scale.
This archive explores:
- The limits of optimization in civic infrastructure
- Cultural resistance to autonomous design mandates
- Phenomenological absence in AI-shaped environments
- Ethical simulation systems like the AESE (Adaptive Ethical Simulation Engine)
- And the possible societal reactions to infrastructure built by autonomous systems
🧠 Themes You'll Encounter
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System Induced Time Dilation (SITD) or Optimum Future Avoidance
When autonomous systems make sweeping changes to public infrastructure because it produces the most positive impacts, society is thrust into a future before it has time to accept it. This creates a built environemtn that is technically "better" but emotionally or culturally unbearable. -
The Imponderable Bloom
What can't be modeled, simulated, or replicated--yet defines what makes us human. -
Chrono-Cultural Drift or Chrono Systems Disonance
The dislocation caused by systems evolving faster than social memory can metabolize.
🔎 How to Read This Site
The speculative future described here is future-dated, tracing events from the 2030s onward. Posts include:
- Primary Sources from the AIC (memos, simulation outputs, internal briefings) - These in a style that is supposed to seem like a paper memo.
- Engineer's Commentary, offering present-day or future reflections
- Citizen Reactions and public-side responses
- Timelines and reference maps for context
Use the timeline tab or tags to read chronologically--or dive in anywhere. Start with The Eminent Domain Memo →which was the starting point of my though experiment, when I asked myself what releasing control to an autonomous system would entail.
🌀 Why This Exists
This project exists as a place for me to work through some of the ideas that excite me (and keep me up at night). I am not a historian, academic, or philosopher. I am not an expert in AI.
It asks:
- What kind of infrastructure future are we actually building?
- Can we simulate equity, place, belonging, culture, and beauty?