Design has long ceased to be seen as a discipline of aesthetics and functionality. It looks for possibilities, using imagination as its inspiration to find opportunities to create more habitable worlds of tomorow. This exhibition is devoted to themes of the distant and near future possibilities.
An exhibition of Near Future Laboratory's Work Kit of Design Fiction at the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts in Leipzig, Germany. The Work Kit of Design Fiction is exhibited, providing a hands-on experience for attendees and a grounded approach to imagining futures. The exhibition is divided into three chapters and is devoted to themes of the distant and near future. Included in these themes are proposals from the fields of art and design, which use speculative methods to make different futures visible and tangible. Symbiotic, post-human, and interspecies relationships are the focus. We question the role and responsibility of humans within the ecosystem. The emphasis is on cooperation with microorganisms, cohabitation with animals and...

Episode N°093 of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast with filmmaker, director Gary Hustwit, the creative punk mind behind documentaries Rams, Helvetica and Objectified. We dive into his journey in independent filmmaking, his DIY ethos, and his bold ideas about storytelling in a digital world. Gary shares his approach to creating generative cinema—films that evolve and change with each viewing. We explore what it means to push against the boundaries of trad filmmaking, trad distribution, and the creative process. A deep and inspiring conversation about art, risk, and ways of imagining harder.

New Essay in a sweet new book titled ‘Practices of Future Casting: Ways of Sharing Imagined Tomorrows’, a massive and meaningful collection that brings together essays, interviews, and design projects from leading futurists, designers, and thinkers, including the aforementioned essay by Tobias Revell and myself. Edited by Michael Shamiyeh, with contributions from Cory Doctorow, Elliot P. Montgomery, Alex McDowell and others — the volume gets right into the power of storytelling, Design Fiction, and speculative thinking to challenge assumptions and imagine transformative futures. It's got contributions and contributors spanning sustainability, technology, and cultural foresight. Definitely a must-read for anyone seeking to explore the creative edges of what’s possible. Perfect for researchers, designers, and future-thinkers alike.

This image of a PC build — its smoke-glass clear-case window ajar to revel in all of its RGB glory — with a very cyberpunk glowing massive CPU cooler has this exquisite and wonderfully bewildering contrast with a kind of cottage core setting in some guy's, what? Dining room or something? You've got this sort of cottagecore furniture or something I imagine seeing at a flea market or yard sale. And then the cat tree thing there (and cat tail dangling from a window) and all the porcelain miniatures in the shelving unit there — and what seems to be a shelving unit like you used to hold CDs and DVDs in? The ones with the glass door front, I think? ANd there is what seems to be an ashtray, possibly? Curious how this thing just dominates the modest two-seater table.

The Design Fiction project ‘Geneva Map for an Autonomous Vehicle Future’ is a canonical example of how Design Fiction can be used to create a tangible future that can be discussed and debated. A kind of 'applied imagination' that is a way to make the future more real and to help people understand the implications of new technologies.
The approach of Design Fiction involves producing a prospective scenario and materializing it as an everyday object, comprehensible and accessible to everyone, to spark situated discussions on societal issues such as technological change.
The objective of this mandate will be to create a plausible map of the City of Geneva designed for autonomous vehicles, which will facilitate discussion on the urban implications of such a deployment.

The torment nexus is a critique of the relationship between Silicon Valley and Science Fiction, where tech entrepreneurs often turn speculative fiction into blueprints for real-world innovation. Design Fiction emerges as an alternative, offering a structured way to imagine potential futures without locking into one path.

A Plenary Address at the IEEE MetroCon 2024 for the nations' largest IEEE regional conference covering nine parallel technical tracks covering emerging developments in engineering disciplines including: Autonomous and Vehicle Systems, Internet of Things, Computational Intelligence, Photonics and more.

In this new podcast series from Deem Journal, Radha Mistry, a designer with a background that spans architecture, narrative environments, and strategic foresight, unpacks the purpose and practice of futuring, and introduces us to six venerable practitioners who approach this work in myriad ways.

Ian Chalmers and I did a kind of fireside chat at the RGD's 2024 annual conference in Toronto.