A podcast episode where I discuss the concept of Design Fiction and how it can aid brands in strategic planning. Design Fiction offers a unique approach to envisioning the future, emphasizing the creation of tangible, thought-provoking scenarios over traditional analytical methods.
IN CLEAR FOCUS is a weekly podcast offering fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising from experienced practitioners and notable thought leaders. With topics relevant to B2C and B2B marketers, we discuss strategy, branding, media, creative, and analytics.
HOST: Coming up in this episode of InClearFocus.
Julian: What is design plus science fiction? Can you conflate those two ways of seeing and sensing and representing possibility?
HOST: Youâre listening to InClearFocus, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by BigEye, a strategy led, full service creative agency. Growing brands for clients globally. Hello. Iâm your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Itâs the end of the year, a time when research and insights agencies publish reports predicting which emerging consumer behaviours will become the trends that shape 2024.
Over the past several weeks on InClearFocus, weâve spoken to practitioners who look beyond trends to think longer term, imagining a range of possible futures for organisations and brands. In episode 4 of this season, Helen Edwards talked to us about identifying marginal behaviors that have the potential to go mainstream.
And in episode 3, Scott Smith and Susan Cogsmith of Changeist discussed futuring and developing applied foresight cultures within design and marketing teams. Todayâs guest has collaborated on projects with Scott and Susan, and is widely acknowledged as the originator of a practice called design fiction, which many leading foresight, insight, and innovation agencies employ.
Julian Bleeker is a futures designer, product innovator, engineer, serial entrepreneur, podcast host, and creative team leader. A true polymath, Julian obtained his bachelorâs degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and his masterâs in engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle, where he was at the center of R& D for Virtual Reality 1.
- Julian received his PhD from the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, but it was a manifesto that Julian wrote in 2008 entitled A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction, which was the genesis for what has blossomed into an international practice, which Julian describes in more depth in his book The Manual of Design Fiction.
To discuss how design fiction can help brands move from the present to the future, Julian is joining us today from his studio in Venice, Los Angeles, California. Julian, welcome to InClearFocus.
Julian: Thank you, itâs lovely to be
HOST: here. Julian, letâs start with a definition. What is design fiction?
Julian: Yeah, so definitions are beautiful and also sometimes tricky.
But when Iâm asked, as you just did, I describe it as a method to vividly render tangible future scenarios before taking action or using those representations of possible futures to help guide and inform and shape decision making. So I think to kind of flesh that out and add a little bit more sense to that.
Itâs the translation of ideas that an organization might have about what it wants to do in the future and rather than representing those ideas in the typical way that you might in a commercial context or even any context, you know, itâs like as a statement as a North Star statement. This is where weâre trying to get to.
To augment those kinds of prosaic statements, I find that it is incredibly powerful and effective to have some kind of tangible representation of what that means in a form as if that future were obtained. So literally artifacts, things that in some future an archaeologist might dig up and try to wonder about.
If they are not able to find the fragments that are written, you just find fragments that are components or symptoms, implications of the worlds that would be experienced. So itâs something thatâs meant to not replace the ways in which an organization might imagine into its future, which is typically done with future vision videos or just statements that might go out, you know, sort of taglines for an organization that can travel and they can be quite vivid.
But if you add something that is, this is what we mean that you can point to and people can hold in some fashion where people can kind of ponder and look at from a variety of angles and sides, adding to youâre augmenting those more prosaic forms of imagining into possible futures.
HOST: Well, Julian, when you were a kid seeing the Star Trek.
communicator device was a kind of a light bulb moment for you. So could you tell us a bit more about the impact Star Trek has had on your journey towards developing design
Julian: fiction? Yeah, so thereâs something about Star Trek and it had as much to do with the development of my consciousness, my understanding of what the world was and what was possible and all those kinds of things.
So, you know, itâs an age where you just, your mind is so wide open to possibility and You feel more than you make sense of things. You make sense through the kinds of feelings that you have when you see something, you experience something, or youâre exposed to something. And it was a time when, you know, there was the television, there was a lot of television and Star Trek would come on the television and I didnât know what it was other than what I felt about it.
I mean, I knew enough to know that, okay, obviously this is a scripted drama and these kinds of things, youâre eight or nine, you get those sorts of things. But there was something about the world that was being crafted in these moments that you could capture, you know, once a week, cause there was no streaming and you would capture this thing.
And thereâs something about the devices in that, like the objects, the affordances that the crew of the enterprise would have at their disposal. And it just drew me in, in this kind of way where itâs just the only thing I could really come up with was like, Oh, thatâs really cool. Look at that. Thatâs cool.
Isnât that cool? And it is this feeling because of what the affordance was able to do, whether itâs like a tricorder or a communicator. And so seeing that kinda shaped me in a way. But then it was when I saw those things represented as if they actually existed in the world outside of the television set.
So when I saw my local hobby shop, these drawings of these devices in engineering form, as if they were things that were built by some factory someplace. And there was a moment of like just beautiful confusion where it felt like this thing had a different story behind it. It wasnât just something on a television.
It was something that existed in the world and was sort of represented in this thing that I later found out was the Star Trek Starfleet technical manual. So itâs a manual about the things and the ships and the organization that represented Starfleet. And it just. Totally changed the way in which I saw and understood the world in a beautiful way and a set of trajectories.
So as a kid, itâs like, okay, I want to be like an engineer or an astronaut or maybe like a fighter pilot, like very typical adolescent sorts of desires and dreams. And I ended up becoming an engineer. And I think it was definitely something about that connection between futures as represented by Star Trek.
So itâs in a different century from the one that weâre living in. So that sort of meant like, okay, so this is what a future could look like. And then the connection to engineering was, yeah, so there are these instruments or these devices or these things that require power and theyâve got transistors in them.
Who does those kinds of things? Right. Engineers do that. So let me become an engineer and then I can have some role in shaping little tiny futures, little corners of the world. And in the end, what I really understood is like, I was chasing after that feeling that I had when I was first exposed to it that, Oh, cool.
And I wanted to find that wherever I could. And I wanted to be a part of like, you know, facilitating, having that feeling, you know, for myself and for others around me, like, look at this, isnât this cool, I made this thing. And that sort of in a way was that early impact that Star Trek had on my journey towards eventually becoming an engineering and then finding the way in which that woke, cool feeling was created.
Which I kind of wanted to operationalize in some sense and ended up calling it design fiction. Relationship between design as a material making practice and using that material making practice to represent possible futures, possible worlds that we could occupy and just kind of using that word fiction as a way to represent that ambition.
HOST: So, Iâm curious, Julian, how did the science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, come to play a role in the evolution of design fiction?
Julian: Yeah, so this was just a number of happy kind of coincidences. I was in Los Angeles and at the time I was working in and around these ideas that I had and trying to find the way that I could almost, you know, in some sense, sort of, Formalize this dream practice of making things and doing engineering to tell stories about possible worlds and having those worlds be things that kind of set a trajectory or direction for a commercial organization.
What do you call that? And at the time Bruce Sterling was in Los Angeles, he was a futurist in residence at Art Center College of Design and I didnât know him before he was here, and while he was here, he was, you know, doing the things that a Bruce Sterling kind of character would do. So he was like floating around and sort of meeting different communities of practice within Los Angeles and just basically enjoying the possibility that he, you know, find out what other people are doing.
And so he would come to USC. Where I was teaching. So as a professor at USC in the film school, and thatâs where we connected. And I got assigned to be essentially the reader of a new book he was working on and use that as a way to kind of facilitate a kind of salon like discussion amongst a bunch of other faculty from universities around Southern California.
So a bit nervous. to do this, but through that we became friends, you know, became connected and sort of stimulating each other creatively and professionally. And I was just sort of interested in like, what is a science fiction writer doing at an art school? Like, what are you doing over there? And he said, just very matter of fact, itâs like, well, I want to learn about design.
And I thought that was, I was just kind of floored. I was like, wow, okay, you can, one can do that. That was sort of eye opening to me in a very naive way. And. I would have these series of conversations with him over the many months and years around that time where I said, you know, what is design plus science fiction?
And essentially thatâs what the phrase kind of came and he sort of wrote a little bit about that in his book, shaping things. How can a science fiction writer do design? And what would it be to do fiction through design? Like, and you conflate those two. Ways of seeing and sensing and representing possibility.
What are the two things come together? And that just kind of set me on a trajectory, imagining what it would be to do design, but itâs fiction. Julian,
HOST: what is an engineer doing at USC teaching film studies?
Julian: Yeah. So the film school was doing what I thought was incredibly futuristic thing. It is an incredibly futuristic thing to imagine what is the future of film in a world that is kind of networked and kind of database and, and these kinds of things.
And so they were exploring one possible or additional future of visual storytelling, filmmaking being in the future. More like something that integrated interactivity to it. So it was literally, you know, the program was called Interactive Media. I think itâs got a longer title now, but itâs essentially a division of the school.
So theyâve got production, theyâve got critical studies, theyâve got sound and so forth. And they have this new division called Interactive Media. So if youâre going to create visual stories, thereâs going to be this component where itâs not just a linear story, perhaps. And that kind of took the trajectory.
Early on of just very broad explorations and what interactive media was and how it operated and these kinds of things and what are the technical instruments that would shape that would that would make for interactivity and so I was brought on because Iâve been doing a lot of that sort of work. I was previously in New York, so I was doing a lot of stuff within, you know, the dot com, doing a lot of web related sort of things, but also things that included hardware and just real kind of expansive explorations of even what new devices that were out there.
So this is all like, man, itâs like pre there, there were no phones with built in cameras. They were just starting to come on the scene. And people were experimenting with them, hacking them, using them, itâs like, oh, I got a camera in my hand now, itâs, itâs 512 pixels square, you know, just really, really early day stuff, but it felt like Vanguard level things, like, I donât know what this is for, what it can do, and no one has defined that, it hasnât been kind of canonized as like, no, this is what you do with it, so letâs just explore and experiment, I remember writing code for like, things like the Palm Pilot and the Compaq iPaq, and just trying to figure out how can we do these things, and then you start, you Connecting them to GPS devices.
And there was no GPS in it. So youâve got this big honking GPS device connected through some mechanism into these other devices. And youâre starting to build this very cobbled together, beautiful in a macro sense, assemblage of potential and possibility that youâre sensing into. By that, I mean, youâre like, I think thereâs something here.
Wow. Wouldnât it be cool if we could connect. This network device somehow to this GPS device thatâs sending a signal, sending some data, integrate that with an image. What would that be? And you donât know what it is, but youâre doing the experiment and youâre, but thatâs what I mean that youâre at the vanguard because you go around and you tell other people about this and theyâre just kind of like, why would you ever want to do that?
I donât get it. Look at that thing. Itâs terrible. Itâs got this eighth inch cable with a screw on serial connector to it. And it just looks horrible. But youâre like, yeah, but isnât it cool. Like, canât you see where this is? Canât you see that this is just at the edge of the future? Thatâs where we are. And you have that kind of gap of, you know, confusion and meaning.
And so doing those kinds of experiments, doing those explorations was what I guess, you know, in a humble way kind of got me on the radar of places that wanted to look more. They wanted to experiment with possibility. They didnât want just what was already kind of cooked and baked and ready to go. They wanted that exploration, they wanted to bring that to their students.
And so I got a call, basically, and it was fortuitous that I was just finishing up my Ph. D. So, so I had a Ph. D. So, it all felt like it fit together really nicely.
HOST: Mm. Thatâs fantastic. And I remember Organic was an agency that we all looked to in the late 90s to what was happening, what was going to be next.
So, definitely remember the excitement around that period.
Julian: Then organics are good examples because that was one of the places that I was working because they would it was a beautiful moment that felt like a renaissance because there was this large s right people were like weâre willing to experiment because we donât know what this is going to be yet and we see opportunities and possibilities for our advertisers who are saying like hey we need to figure this stuff out and weâre paying you guys good money to figure out what are the ways in which we can connect to our audience what are the new experiences that youâre looking for.
A generation, you know, in three or four times, theyâre just going to expect. We want to be on the leading edge of that. We donât want to wait. And so with this largess, they could fund, you know, essentially these internal R and D studios, which was just people sort of exactly like me, who were kind of like, I just want to do something that feels cool.
And I donât know what it is. I canât promise you what itâs going to be, but I know itâs going to be beautiful because itâs going to come from the future. And thereâs something really powerful about that moment.
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So, to order your copy of You Canât Make Money From a Dead Planet, Go to KoganPage. com. Welcome back. Iâm talking with Julian Bleeker, artist, technologist, educator, originator of design fiction, and the founder of Near Future Laboratory. Earlier this year, you published the 10th anniversary edition of the TBD catalog.
How did that project come together and in what kinds of ways does it exemplify design fiction?
Julian: Yeah, so that project came together maybe a year or so after I wrote this sort of essay manifesto called A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction, which was trying to get out of my head this idea that I had about what design fiction was.
And around that, I wanted to. Try to do is a design fiction project because I had done one. Iâd only sort of like theorized what it could be and understood maybe what I had been doing as an engineer practitioner designer kind of Artist and I wanted to just kind of bring it all together in some way And so I had this idea to me it sounded incredibly simple and just a lot of fun Could I get a bunch of people together in a room and say letâs imagine into a future And letâs represent what we imagine, not as a report, you know, not in a prosaic form, not as like kind of analysis, but translated into the form of a product catalog that has come from that future.
So if we imagine ourselves being able to time travel or maybe being archaeologists who dig up this catalog. From some future and bring it back to show people. Itâs like all this stuff that youâre talking about, you know, all this stuff that youâre reading and the various reports, McKinsey and the Gartner and Accenture and BCG, all these big consultancies are talking about the future.
The economist, you know, has their top 10 things coming down the pike. Suppose instead of like writing about these or even. Iâm bothering to say that these are predictions. Letâs just create that world. Letâs create a little corner of that world, one artifact from that world in the form of a product catalog.
And that was basically the brief and I, and I just sent out an email to about two dozen people who I knew I would enjoy being in a room with them for a few days to imagine this and to begin to create it. Pretty much everyone said like, yeah, letâs do this. And it was a destination kind of jam. It was like, letâs meet in Detroit.
And Detroit just seemed like this place. Cause it was like, itâs just, I donât know. It still has this sense of an era, like a kind of Renaissance in a way, you know, very complicated city in so many ways and not necessarily the place that you think of when you think about doing a futures project. Like this wasnât going to the Bay Area.
This wasnât going to anywhere else. You can imagine where the future is kind of situated in our consciousness. Itâs almost like it feels like a, a ruined past. Of course Detroit isnât that way at all. And itâs, itâs become a destination for me for doing workshops. Iâve just been there twice in the last few months to do workshops.
And so that was essentially the brief just to get people together in a room and imagine into. The future as a design fiction artifact, as an artifact that has come from a possible future. Now,
HOST: youâd probably be way too modest to note this, but I am astounded at how resonant those examples in the TPD catalog are of not our future, but our present today.
You have things on the order form, which I think you call digi coin. Interesting. We today have Bitcoin. You have coconut based pandemic. Long before public awareness of either lab grown protein or the phrase weâre using today for vegan as plant-based. Lots of things in there. In the decade since TBD catalog was first published, how have you seen design fiction being used within client organizations?
Julian: Itâs mostly used to augment the kinds of. Futures work that they might be doing, whether thatâs future strategy, sometimes itâs marketing and communications. Sometimes itâs work meant to help shape and inform and guide decision making. Sometimes itâs work done in the context of learning and development.
So trying to find different approaches and techniques and context in which you can help an organization grow and expand the basis by which it does its work. So sort of workshopping new approaches to doing oftentimes challenging kinds of creative work. What are we going to do next? I mean, itâs like, well, you know, everyoneâs got their opinion, but are there other ways in which we can kind of represent the outcomes of these opinions?
What might the world look like besides whatever ideal kind of vision is locked away in peopleâs imagination. So I really like to think of it as not a replacement for the ways in which organizations do strategy work or communications work, but as something that. Helps enhance the representation and even the communication of it, the ways in which you can kind of distribute through an organization.
So itâs, itâs, you know, I lean on this perspective heavily because Iâve experienced it myself being in a large enterprise, but itâs like, donât send me the power point. Itâs a heavy lift. Thatâs a lot. And Iâm not sure what to do with this. And, you know, requires a lot of words. And so even if you get the PowerPoint, itâs going to be like, okay, well, letâs clear some time in the calendar so you can walk me through this.
Thereâs nothing wrong with that on the face of it, but I think these things can become so much more effective and touch us in a way that we carry the meaning of this work with us more closely, more somatically. Itâs like it becomes a reference point. It becomes the thing where you can say like, oh, itâs kind of like, so you get a long statement.
And then if you have this artifact that represents that statement, I guess the inverse is, you know, thinking of artifacts. If you go through like some of the worldâs greatest museums of natural history or archeology or whatever, itâs like you see the object, you see the artifact, you might read the wall text and you read a little blurb about it in the catalog, but what sticks with you is the experience of being near a material tangible artifact that you like, wow, you know, this came from a place where the remarkable, amazing, if you read about it, thereâs nothing wrong with that on the face of it.
But. It doesnât stick with you in a way. It becomes the analytic part of it. And we know enough about how the human brain works and how we make decisions and how we sense into things that oftentimes that happens that itâs not the rational part of our consciousness. Itâs the feeling part. Itâs the imagination.
Itâs the things that make us dreams. And thatâs the part that I think needs to be touched more when we do this kind of work, whether itâs marketing, communications, advertising, or itâs on the other side of the house, like C level strategy and communication of a vision of an organization.
HOST: Well, Iâm sure you have lots of them, but what has been a favorite design fiction project would you say, and why?
Julian: Yeah, there are a lot of them, arenât there? Okay, thereâs one standout. A very large autonomous vehicle company asked us to help them with their Gen 5 strategy. And it wasnât the kind of thing where itâs like, weâre going to tell them what to do. Because thereâs a level of like knowledge, as you might imagine.
Within that kind of question, thatâs just not going to touch it. Iâm not going to tell you about that. I wouldnât even know where to start. What we were able to do was through a series of what I found exceptionally fun workshops. This is during the pandemic. So it was all online with a number of their teams from engineering with their manufacturing partner.
To their research staff is the research staff being kind of markets research. So the people who do ethnographic in house sort of interviews with potential customers and just trying to understand the world that theyâre entering into. We took all of that and collectively with them, which was a beautiful part of it, wasnât like we grabbed this material and like went away.
Itâs like we kind of kept them involved in the process because very many of them were like, this sounds like fun. Weâre going to imagine into this gen five autonomous vehicle world, but weâre not going to do it from the way that weâre usually expected to do, which is like the analytic approach, tell us what systems we need, how much resolution and the various kinds of LIDAR systems.
It wasnât that it was the world that actual normal humans experience. What is a world in which you summon a vehicle and it comes to you? And where does this idea of autonomous vehicles go? And so, we very early on, through a series of these kinds of discussions, said like, you know, I think we need to do this, so much material here.
And itâs such a rich world that touches so many aspects of the lived human experience. The best way we think to represent this is in the form of a magazine. A magazine as the archetype, the thing that you or I might, you know, might be sitting at, at an airport waiting for a plane. Itâs like, let me go to the newsstand, see whatâs going on.
And you find this magazine and it might not be anything like exceptional or out of this world. It might be just car and driver, only itâs car and driverless. Like, hmm, I wonder whatâs going on in this world. And you pick up this magazine and, you know, through 72 pages of glossy magazine, itâs sort of expressing all the corners of the world when mobility is, for the most part, autonomous.
Itâs not totally perfect, right? And so you can do that in all these forms because the magazine offers you all these different frameworks. Through which ideas and kind of opinion is expressed and products are advertised. So itâs got advertisements, you know, one of the, one of the advertisements is for a childrenâs play set.
Thatâs got an autonomous vehicle. So, you know, when I grew up, it was all hot wheels, right? And so you have hot wheels and theyâve got the play sets and you can get the different models and stuff like that. Like this car that you can say, like, go pick up donuts and youâre watching your little model autonomous vehicle drive up to the Dunkin Donuts.
That was a fun way of, you know, just kind of giving that full breadth of this world. Then you can have the editorial articles, things that are sort of wondering about the future of the driverâs license, which is now called the operatorâs license. So essentially no oneâs driving, so itâs not a driverâs license.
So itâs like, oh, okay, now Iâm starting to get. The contours, the production design of the world, like this is a little bit different. People still look the same. No oneâs wearing a silver LeMay and astronaut helmets. Itâs not that kind of future. And thereâs also tensions, you know, cause it becomes sort of present through the article.
Itâs not didactically stated, but itâs like, Oh. Youâre not allowed to drive your own vehicle. And so now where do the people go who are real proper, you know, internal combustion engine? I like to peel out and do donuts kind of people. How are they upset? How are they affected by this? And you find out itâs like, Oh, thereâs some places you can actually go.
And itâs a special treat, like going to Disney or something like once a year you go and itâs like, yeah, letâs, letâs try driving a car. Daddy, whatâs that? What does that mean? What is this big round thing in the front? Itâs, itâs in my way. Thatâs called a steering wheel. And so you can start to help people Imagine into this possible future, both in fun ways, but then also poignant ways.
One of the research components that had come up was a concern the organization noticed in the research about transportation deserts, places where itâs very difficult to get, you know, have access to mobility. So how do you service those in a world where there are autonomous vehicles, whether itâs, you know, in a city.
Where the mobility offerings are biased to one particular area of the city over another. And so you can kind of represent these things. You donât solve the problem, but you do have like a letter to the editor that might express this. And so itâs just a flag. Itâs just like a signal. Like this is something that we found.
And our job was to translate these things into a way that was more acute, I think, than just getting the big three rim binder with all the research. That you donât really quite get through. Itâs something that kinda lives with you and itâs something that the CEO of the company is like. This is fantastic.
Itâs like I give these things out, you know, I keep a stack at my desk, and itâs a way of sort of representing that they have a particular stake in really trying to make a more habitable future. Theyâre not just in it for the buck.
HOST: Thereâs a lot more to discuss about the practice of design fiction, so weâll be continuing our conversation in next weekâs episode of InClearFocus.
But for now, Julian, if listeners would like to learn more about you, design fiction, and your work with Near Future Laboratory, whatâs the best way to do so?
Julian: The first best way Is to read the books. And so thatâs why I created the big box of design fiction, which includes three of the main books that I think give one a really good sense of what weâre trying to do and how weâre trying to do it.
So itâs the manual design fiction, the itâs time to imagine harder, which I refer to as a readerâs guide to the manual design fiction. So why design fiction and then TBD catalog, which I think is probably the best example of what design fiction looks, feels, and kind of senses like. I refer to the manual design fiction, itâs like the worldâs first book to come with community.
So everyone who gets the book gets an invitation to join the near future laboratory discord, which is that place where there are now a couple thousand people who are engaged in the topic and trying to figure out how to engage more. Thatâs also where, you know, a lot of the announcements kind of happen.
HOST: And weâll also include links to the near future laboratory website, the podcast and the shop where folks can find design fiction books and related products. Julian, weâll continue this conversation in next weekâs episode, of course, but for now, thank you very much for being our guest on In Clear Focus.
Julian: Itâs my pleasure. Super fun talking to you.
HOST: Thanks again to my guest, Julian Bleeker, design fiction pioneer and the founder of Near Future Laboratory. As always, youâll find a full transcript of our conversation, along with links to the resources we discussed, on the Big Eye website at bigeyeagency. com.
Just select podcast from the menu. Thank you for listening to In Clear Focus, produced by Big Eye. Iâve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next year, goodbye.
