Nika Simovich Fisher
Assistant Professor
Parsons / The New School for Design
Invisible Nightlife Review is a speculative writing and publishing project I taught at The New School, developed in collaboration with Dirt, an experimental media company.
The project asked students to treat fiction as a design tool. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, students created 800-word essays in the form of poetic logs, imagined histories, diary entries, or hybrids about nightlife experiences that never happened. The goal wasn’t to document nightlife, but to explore how people move through visibility, intimacy, and risk after dark, and how fiction can surface emotional truths that are hard to express in literal terms.
The project culminated in a public anthology on Dirt, giving selected students professional bylines and the chance to work with editor Daisy Alioto. I served as co-editor and designed the anthology’s microsite. Some stories were adapted into interactive formats—Google Maps as narrative or an audio based experience—extending the themes of disorientation, memory, and blurred realities.
In 2025, when generative tools are speeding everything up and flattening creative voice, speculative writing slows things down. It gives students a way to make something memorable and their own, while contributing humanities based research outside of the classroom.
This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.2: Annual CAA Conference 2026 (In-person only) on Thursday, February 19, 2026.