Imagination is your evolutionary advantage.
It's what unlocks your unrealized potential.
Imagination leads to inspired sense-making.
It offers a vision of the possible and what could be 'next.'
Where others see danger in the unknown, Imagination shows us the Angels of opportunity at the vanguard — beyond the edges of the map, where the unexpected and unanticipated await.
Near Future Laboratory helps you Imagine Harder.
Near Future Laboratory is the creative design, innovation, technology and strategy studio that pioneered the grounded futures practice known as Design Fiction.
It was founded by Julian Bleecker, BSEE, MSEng, Ph.D. in 2004.
Over the last twenty+ years, he has empowered some of the world's largest and most forward-thinking organizations to make sense of, and respond to, the dynamics of the kinetic and uncertain environment in which they operate. As a consultant, facilitator, creative partner, and even as an employee, Near Future Laboratory has helped these organizations amplify their ability to make meaningful strategic choices by grounding creativity and imagination into practical, tangible contexts.
Near Future Laboratory is known for its unique approach to translating analytic research, social-technological trends, and the dreams for possible futures of these kinds of organizations.
This approach brings clarity to the challenge of imagining strategic futures, and a vivid sense of 'what could be'.
We do this through tangible, legible, and meaningful artifacts that provoke conversations, evoke new knowledge, augment sense-making, and help guide and communicate vision.
We sometimes refer to this approach as
Design Fiction combines the material making practice of 'design' (considered broadly) with a keen awareness that objects are containers representing the hopes, fears, dreams, and desires of cultures.
Design Fiction offers a methodological way to simultaneously make, reflect, study, and imagine possibilities.
It combines analytic research, with creative practices; sense-making through making-making. Design Fiction translates speculations into evocative, conversation-starting tangible objects.
Approaches
ASIC: Analyze. Synthesize. Imagine. Create.
My approach is not rigid nor fixed. There is no 'proprietary' process applied rote to every engagement.
I research and analyze the various ways that the future is represented, synthesize the insights and implications, imagine how the analytics might find their way into a world, and become integrated and integral to the world — and then create representations of how they might become part of everyday life in order to ground Imagination and make possiblity tangible and relatable.
Sometimes this feels like playing the part of an archeologist who 'digs' into possible futures and finds the shard of material that has come from that future.
Sometimes this requires experimenting with the forms we express our insights & knowledge. Sometimes it means that the arrangement of our ontological furniture should take help us see the world from other vantage points, or move us adjacent to our routine and hygienic ways of being and occupying the world. Shifting the contexts of expected outcomes, delivering insights in something that augments the old-fashioned report, PowerPoint deck or video presentation is crucial for integrating comfort with uncertainty and the unexepected.
We emphasize the creation of actual material cultural implications of the future, of the next, of change. Holding them in the hand, as if artifacts that have come from some future is instrumental in representing the dreams of possibility. When you can hold in your hand the 'not true yet', it changes the way you sense-make, communicate, and relate to the unknown.
(And it is more effective as communication, and travels more effectively, as a material artifact rather than an email or, heaven forbid, another PowerPoint deck.)
Prototyping Futures
Prototyping Futures captures the sense by which Near Future Laboratory operates both in the speculative and the practical/pragmatic. Materializing from the edges of plausibility or even from the edges of what 'makes sense'.
All of my ideas take shape as 'the not true *yet' — a 'Slow Messenger' that is an embodiment of the implications of a turn away from always-on, always-connected ways of being.
A quotidian product catalog that appears like so many others on our front door step or mailbox, yet this one has come Twilight Zone-like, from one a possible future or even from some nearby timeline — an 'adjacent now'.
I prioritize the making of a thing — not just discussing it, but rather using craftwork to assemble ideas in material as a prototype from a possible future to stir conversation, activate, inspire and reflect. Sometimes prototypes yield new insights as they extend conversations into physical form. Sometimes prototypes embody strategy and provide a concrete, tangible reference and representation that sits as a totem on the desk, reminding one of a set of ideas, a strategic ambition, or north star. They are always more provocative and reflective than a PDF buried in an email inbox.
And Here
Operating Systems
Actively maintaining and developing a broad range of interests, constant skills-building, curiosity, and an intrepid creative spirit are what undergird my ways of operating.
I believe Imagination is our most valuable and existentially vital capability
Bringing Creativity back into rich, meaningful collaboration with Rationality is my mission.
Finding the ways Imagination and Structure can become more integral to the epistemologies and ontologies of what we often refer to as 'work' is what I strive to achieve in what I create. There seems to me to be no more important task at hand.
Integrating Imagination into ways of sense-making and strategy isn't a deviation, but rather the way to see into the unknown. Imagination is how we see unexpected opportunities.
To Imagine thoroughly, one must have an optimism and intrepid spirit that assumes that the unexpected and unknown at the edge of the map is full of Angels — not Dragons.
BS Electrical Engineering
(Computational Systems Design)
MS Engineering
(Human-Computer Interaction Design, VR & History of Technology)
Ph.D. History of Consciousness
(Philosophy of Technology & Culture)
Case Studies
Imagine a world where things drive themselves. We created a 72 page full-color printed magazine that imagines that world with all its implications; a world where self-driving cars are normal, ordinary, and everyday.
Every business leader should make their Annual Report from four years in their future..every year.
Read More
ADM, a pioneer in the agribusiness sector, was looking for ways to showcase their research and development in low-carbon impact food science. ADM's Marketing & Communications Team partnered with Near Future Laboratory to conduct a comprehensive interview series with their Chief Scientists and a team of food science experts so as to imagine ways to translate their analytic work into some forms that would be grounded, legible, and relatable to the general public.
Imagining a future of self-driving cars using the humble quick-start guide as a container of the implications and contingencies of the autonomous way of life.
The Interaction Design Association invited Near Future Laboratory to introduce Design Fiction to the interaction design community by facilitating a Design Fiction workshop. In this case, we decided to imagine the self-driving future from a design and interaction design perspective by creating a Design Ficiton quick-start guide for a fictional self-driving car.
Workshops, Keynotes, Creative Ideation
Organizing Human Creative Potential
I am constantly evolving and exploring means and mechanisms by which I can organize and facilitate unlocking the creative potential of individuals, teams, and organizations. In one way or another, I've been doing this for decades: four years as a University Professor in the graduate Interactive Media program at the University of Southern California's famous School of Cinematic Arts (USC Film School), as a start-up founder at OMATA, shepherding the Near Future Laboratory's 20 years of design/technology practice, mentoring graduate students, and countless professional, academic, and commercial workshops within Google, Amazon, the AIGA, Meta, Apple, Royal College of Art, technical consulting for Netflix film productions and many, many more.
Futures Talk Inspires Imagination
I've participated in a wide-range of projects beyond Big Tech engagements, including consulting to film production as a technical creative advisor, as an engaging speculator for public documentaries for television, public education, museums. I've participated as an expert on futures of many commercial sectors from 'future of social network' to 'futures of dating' and 'futures of food'.
Books, Work Kits & Artifacts From Possible Near Futures
