As the digital present barrels into the mid-2020s, the most urgent stories are not about what’s beginning, but what’s ending. At NEXT25, the theme was explicit: “This is the End.” Yet the mood was anything but funereal. Experts, performers, and provocateurs gathered to argue that when an era ends – be it creativity, passive screens, or our surety about what “real” even means – something vital also begins.

Endings, the conference suggested, are not dead-ends but pivots that open new routes into agency, experience, and meaning.

The end of creativity: Rediscovering human inputs

An improvisational performance set the tone – a live experiment where dancer Brett Perry was shadowed by his own AI double. As Brett moved on stage, an AI model projected a simulacrum of him: echoing his learned gestures, even composing music attuned to his style. For the audience, it was a moment of awe and ambiguity. “Let the (AI) intern do that, let it write the report,” John Michael Schert quipped – a familiar refrain in offices everywhere, a signal that automatisation is eating the heart of creative work.

But the narrative swiftly pivoted from anxiety to possibility. John Michael argued that output is no longer the human differentiator; instead, our future hinges on the quality of inputs we feed into the system. When machines generate infinite outcomes, curation, intention, and empathy become the scarce arts. What begins to matter is not just what is made but why, for whom, and with what emotional resonance. Dance on stage transformed: no longer just performance, but a live act of questioning – what remains for us, when machines can mimic so much?

The answer, at least on this stage, is everything that cannot be easily coded: embodied trust, communal connection, non-verbal nuance. If the language of the workplace changes from “create the product” to “create the conditions for trust,” then leadership and artistry, too, become less about perfection of outcome than about steering, holding space, and meaning-making. These are strategies both ancient and – ironically – newly crucial.

The age of immersion: Beyond screens, into experience

While AI’s encroachment on creativity raised eyebrows, Adrian Hon’s session demonstrated that we aren’t simply retreating into passive consumption. Instead, a hunger for immersion – deep, participatory experience – is exploding. For Adrian, “immersion” is not a marketing term but a centuries-long human urge to inhabit worlds beyond our own. From 19th-century panoramic paintings to today’s blockbuster LARPs or projection-mapped museums, the impulse to feel transported is universal.

What’s changed isn’t the desire but the technology. Today’s immersive environments – whether it’s the Disney Star Wars Hotel or Netflix converting malls into Bridgerton balls – promise not just sight and sound, but movement, agency, and transformation. Where last century’s media was about sitting and watching, now what’s valued is moving, touching, socialising – experiences that are embodied, not merely observed.

Yet, as he warned, most so-called immersive experiences still fall short of real transformation. Attendees often find themselves walking through “interactive” spaces that still treat them as spectators, not true participants. The magic lies in plunging deeply: when the boundary between self and stage is blurred, when risk and novelty provoke new ways of being. This, Adrian argued, is what people hunger for after “the end of the screen” – not just better entertainment, but richer ways of encountering themselves and each other.

The end of the screen: Toward embodied, participatory interfaces

If mass media made us predominantly watchers, the digital humanities now invite us to become doers once more. Multiple NEXT25 sessions pointed to a tipping point: screens, for all their dominance, may have reached their evolutionary zenith. The awe-inspiring spectacle of Las Vegas’s The Sphere – wrapped in 360º LED – signalled that as big as screens can get, the next leap won’t be in pixels, but in touch, space, and sensory presence.

The emergent paradigm is clear: interfaces are rapidly shifting from visual display to embodied interaction. Technology is no longer content to sit on the desk or wall. Mixed reality headsets, movement-tracking rooms, and spatialised AI companions all signal a world in which engagement is physical, multi-sensory, and deeply participatory. The call is not just to witness, but to move, make, and belong.

This rebalancing of agency – where the participant is collaborator, not consumer – puts a premium on the design of systems that honour agency, risk, and communal ritual. It also asks creators to think far beyond what can be “shown” and consider what can be enacted, enacted together, or, crucially, ended and left behind with intent.

The humanoid frontier: Robots, social trust, and the edges of identity

Questions of agency and interaction turn urgent as humanoid robots step from laboratories into the messy spaces of work, care, and daily life. At NEXT25, the conversation around robots was not dystopian; instead, it focused on the real-world frictions and openings created as machines become social actors. When a robot is more than a tool – when it can sense emotion, remember context, collaborate – what happens to trust, empathy, and the fabric of social labour?

Humanoid robots demand new skill sets and rituals, both for the machines and the humans. What boundaries are necessary to safeguard human identity? Can empathy cross the digital/biological divide? How does one design for trust, when some participants in the interaction are non-human? These themes echoed throughout the day: in healthcare, empathy is prized not just for bedside manner but as a form of adaptive intelligence; in workplaces, robots may soon handle onboarding, peer support, and even collective celebrations.

For all this, the future imagined at NEXT25 is not a binary contest between “us” and “them.” Rather, it’s a creative negotiation of how boundaries are redrawn, and how new kinds of agency, support, and even friendship might be designed.

Truth, information, and resilience in a post-illusion world

If AI challenges authorship and robots provoke new rituals, the information crisis tests nothing less than reality itself. We are witnessing “the end of truth,” the end of illusions that information could be reliably sorted from misinformation through technical means alone. From deepfakes to hyper-personalised media feeds, “trust” has become partial, contextual, and fiercely contested.

Yet, the message was not purely defensive. Instead, Nina Jankowicz positioned this as a trial by fire: a call to collective resilience and invention. Democratic institutions, she argued, cannot be saved by algorithms alone, but require grassroots reconstitution of trust, new rituals for verification, and shared spaces for public meaning-making. The loss of old anchors – whether journalistic authority, expert consensus, or singular narratives – invites us to become builders of new ones, more adaptive and locally attuned.

Here again, endings emerge as beginnings. With shared truth in flux, the invitation is not to despair but to innovate – socially, technically, and even spiritually.

Designing endings: The art of closure in digital culture

Perhaps the subtlest of all observations is this: in digital life, we rarely get to end things with satisfaction. Joe Macleod’s reflections on “the end of the digital experience” raise an often-ignored point – good endings matter. In a world of endless notifications, streaming feeds, and open conversational loops, the absence of closure can weigh heavily. Dissatisfying endings erode trust, blur agency, and sap meaning from what used to feel complete.

The design of experiences – apps, platforms, even social rituals – too often fixates on onboarding and engagement, leaving the “offboarding” haphazard or non-existent. Joe called for renewed attention to the art of departure, to clear transitions and rituals that respect the dignity of conclusion. Endings, after all, allow for renewal. In their absence, everything blurs into a formless now, driving a low-grade exhaustion that infects both work and play.

Endings as possibility: Navigating the transition

The ultimate argument of NEXT25 is as philosophical as it is practical. Endings aren’t simply things to be feared, or worse, ignored in the hope that growth will always continue. They are scaffolds for becoming – midpoints rather than closures. The end of creative authorship opens a pathway to new roles as questioners, framers, curators. The end of screen-based engagement propels us into a future of embodied, relational, and multisensory interaction. And the end of simple truths invites the construction of more robust, adaptive forms of trust and meaning.

Every threshold, for NEXT25, is a test: Who will step forward and claim agency amid uncertainty? Who will collaborate, find ritual, and imbue the digital – and post-digital – with new forms of care, resilience, and closure? The work ahead is not about building forever, but about learning to build – and end – well.