TRANSCRIPT
Designing the Future | Gartner Futures Lab Podcast Episode 018 July 11, 2024
[00:00:00] Announcer: This is the Gartner Futures Lab podcast. Welcome
[00:00:15] Marty: to the Gartner Futures Lab. I’m your host and co lead of the lab, Marty Resnick. And today I’m very excited to be joined by Julian Bleecker. Julian, welcome to the show. Why don’t you take a minute or two and introduce yourself to our audience?
[00:00:29] Julian: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Marty. I appreciate the opportunity to sit down and have a chat with you.
[00:00:34] Julian: Yeah. So my name is Julian Bleecker. I’m the founder of Near Future Laboratory, which has been around for 20 years now. And basically we’re a creative design, innovation, technology and strategy studio. I think the thing that we’re kind of most known for is pioneering the kind of grounded futures practice known as design fiction.
[00:00:53] Marty: So let’s talk about design fiction. You and I. I have been talking about it a little bit off and on over the last year or so, but maybe if you could describe what design fiction is all about and how it helps us as futurists.
[00:01:04] Julian: Yeah, sure. So design fiction, it’s a bit of a neologism that this sort of ginned up with the science fiction author, as well as like kind of cultural critic and polymath, uh, Bruce Sterling.
[00:01:18] Julian: And so I’m based in Los Angeles. There’s a time when Bruce was in Los Angeles and he was, uh, I’m a futurist in residence at Art Center College of Design, and I was a professor at that time at the University of Southern California in the film school. And we had an opportunity to kind of connect, and we ended up hanging out a bit, and I wondered to him out loud, what is it to be a science fiction author, you know, kind of doing a residency at a design school?
[00:01:46] Julian: College. And this idea of the science fiction mindset, you know, has incredibly expansive, creative kind of visionary thinker thinks of things in the future and in some mode translates those into prose when he’s writing science fiction. And I wondered like, how could you translate visions of possible futures, not into prose, but into designed artifacts.
[00:02:09] Julian: And that kind of kicked this whole idea of bringing design together with fiction into one. Uh, methodology or mindset or approach, just conversation. What is it to make objects from the future in the mode of, uh, what you think of when you do science fiction, just sort of speculating about what could be, as opposed to what we oftentimes think of as design as a very instrumentally guided, pragmatic exercise where you create something that you’re actually going to manufacture.
[00:02:37] Julian: And it was interesting to me to think about how you could create fictional objects and have them inform and shape your ideas about. You know, it was also combining all these other kind of fascinations that I had at the time. So, teaching at a film school, right, like a world renowned film school. And I’m beginning to have conversations with production people, just in a kind of collegial way.
[00:02:59] Julian: And meeting, you know, people like Alex McDowell, who’s a fascinating production designer, who’s also a professor there. What are all these kinds of ways of connecting? Cross pollinating and integrating different approaches and perspectives and set ambitions and sense of purpose with these disciplines that in some one way or another, we’re all kind of doing the same thing.
[00:03:18] Julian: And the same thing was we’re trying to imagine into possible futures and we’re trying to do it for entertainment sake. We’re trying to do it because we’re a company trying to create the next greatest product. And we’re doing it from the perspective of we’re trying to just sort of fashion an imaginary, a vision.
[00:03:36] Julian: Of what could be of the world otherwise. And all this kind of came together in a beautiful way. And, um, over several, many years experimenting with it and trying to reflect on what it is and what it meant and what it could be, it became established. I guess it became part of the vernacular in and around what people like you and me do and what organizations.
[00:03:58] Julian: Of all different sizes and types do, which is essentially try to figure out what’s next.
[00:04:04] Marty: So we’ve spoken a lot on this show about, uh, science fiction, prototyping the idea of instead of taking 50 PowerPoint slides and all these different documents to the board, we can, we can write a story. We can say, okay, here’s a science fiction story.
[00:04:20] Marty: Of what we think the future is going to look like, or it could be a comic book or a movie or a short video or something. Where does design fiction fit into that approach or does it?
[00:04:31] Julian: Yeah, I think all the approaches that you’re kind of intimating, and specifically science fiction prototyping, um, we could also add speculative design, speculative fiction, like all these are modalities of translating imagination into some other, uh, structure, some other form.
[00:04:49] Julian: And so, yeah. They all have value in various contexts and they all kind of resonate with each other. And there’s a lot of talk across those amongst the practitioners and the people who kind of have established it, or, you know, whatever wrote the book about it. For example, I wrote the manual of design fiction.
[00:05:04] Julian: Brian David Johnson wrote science fiction prototyping. Tony Dunn and Fiona Raby wrote speculative everything. You know, we’re all in conversation. We’re all trying to find ways of providing a set of tools and approaches and mindsets and philosophies and theories and. Instructions for articulating visions of what could be into various concrete forms.
[00:05:27] Julian: Now, science fiction prototyping goes down the path of let’s imagine into the future and let’s do science fiction to help represent that. Science fiction is a mode of imagining and articulating. You know, stories about possible worlds, and oftentimes, you know, they take one or two forms sort of roughly speaking.
[00:05:46] Julian: They’re either like a novel, it’s a paperback book or that you pick up and you kind of flip through and there on the page are a bunch of words strung together into structures called paragraphs and paragraphs become chapters, chapters become old stories, or they become a film. And a film’s got, you know, typically three acts, and those acts are kind of written in a screenplay, and that screenplay is translated into a production setup, and there’s storyboards, and there’s production design, and people make props, and special effects people, and sometimes you spend, uh, You know, six or eight weeks in a very large green room, and all these things have sort of our ways of doing this, trying to create a vision of what could be, um, and entertain us and those kinds of things.
[00:06:27] Julian: Now, the difference between something like science fiction prototyping and design fiction is that when I get a piece of science fiction, I kind of know that it is a form of science fiction. I pick up a book and I know that I’m reading a book and what I was trying to do, or, you know, if I walk into a movie theater.
[00:06:45] Julian: I know that, oh look, the lights are dimmed, there’s the little pre screen, I see a bunch of trailers, and then there’s the thing telling me to leave my seat and go get a coke and a hot dog. We know the kinds of worlds that we’re immersed in when we have these, and the way in which we receive these visions of possible futures are different.
[00:07:01] Julian: They’re not any more or less of value, but they’re different. And what design fiction does is it’s trying to get you in the mode of wondering what you’re actually holding in your hand. So design fiction relies on design as a material making practice. To actually make a prototype, make an artifact, make an object that has come from that world.
[00:07:22] Julian: And so this is where the distinction is. Again, you know, neither one is better or worse than the other. I happen to like the design fiction, not just because I kind of came up with the term, but because I like making stuff. I like making things. My background’s in engineering, so I like this idea of imagining into material.
[00:07:41] Julian: And I’m not a great science fiction writer. I’ve tried. It just never really took hold. I love films and make small films, but I think that there are people who do it much better. But what I know I can do really well, um, I’ve learned over the years is create artifacts that feel like they actually exist.
[00:07:59] Julian: And that could be a newspaper that seems like it’s come from some future. It could be like a catalog of products that feels like, Oh, wait, this just came in the mail. I wonder what’s going on here. And I like that little bit of kind of cognitive play where you are making someone feel like this thing that you’re holding in your hand actually exists.
[00:08:20] Julian: And that opens up a conversation because the first thing someone will say is, wait, what is this? And I want to get people in that wait, what is it mode so that we can discuss and learn and evolve and develop rather than just telling them the future. Rather than being didactic and kind of saying, this is what’s going to happen.
[00:08:39] Julian: I want to provide people with clues, implications, almost like a crime scene. Like you walk into a crime scene and there are just clues around. Or, uh, you know, some kind of the experience that I imagine archaeologists have when they dig through the earth and they find an artifact. They know something created it and they begin to wonder, they ask themselves questions.
[00:08:59] Julian: What is this thing? Is this indicative of a place where people used to cook? And if they cooked, what did they eat? And if they ate, how did they hunt it? And you get into that mode of exploring and kind of wondering into a world rather than as, you know, typically the case with something that’s more didactic, like a novel or a film.
[00:09:18] Julian: It’s you’re being told the story, you’re not wondering and trying to unpack the clues and try to understand the world in a different direction.
[00:09:24] Marty: It’s interesting. We actually go kind of the opposite direction here that we’ve learned from archeology, which is this idea of what do we think the future is going to look like?
[00:09:33] Marty: And if people were looking back, what kind of artifacts would they see or, or what would these things look like in the future? For example, you and I had a great conversation and you introduced me to this idea of like, what’s serial of the future would look like. And, and you were explaining how just a box of cereal tells us so much about the world.
[00:09:55] Marty: And society at given times, can you kind of elaborate on that? Am I explaining that right about cereal?
[00:10:00] Julian: Yeah. So, um, it’s, I like the cereal example as well, because one of the things that design fiction does, or, you know, when it does, When it works really well, I found out that it’s, you’re grounding the future in something that is not just tangible, like a box of cereal, but relatable to pretty much everyone, assuming that everyone eats breakfast or has a first meal of the day.
[00:10:22] Julian: And when you do that, all of a sudden, you’re not in the kind of lofty world of, Interesting, but vague abstractions like metaverse. The first question that comes out is like, sorry, what is that? And what does it mean? And what does it feel like? And how does it change what, um, how I wake up in the morning, what I eat for breakfast, how I make decisions about what to eat, all these kinds of things that, that are much more relatable than the abstraction.
[00:10:47] Julian: And so the box of cereal as an example is that it’s a grounded representation of the future. It’s something that you can associate, you know, one’s own experience, whether or not you’re forthright about it, or you think it’s relevant, let’s say to the problem that you’re working. I might be like, Hey, what does a box of cereal have to do with the metaverse?
[00:11:05] Julian: And my sort of response to questions like that is like, that’s a really good question, but let’s assume if there is a world in which, you know, metaverse is, uh, as normal, ordinary, and every day as. Yeah. Television remote controls. We’re going to also be in a world where there’s metaverse and there’s still going to be breakfast.
[00:11:24] Julian: So trying to connect those things and it’s a fun way of trying to make sense of something that for very many people is quite a serious thing like metaverse, like replacing big bets on that. Um, so we need to figure out this world and we need to start building stuff and you want to understand. Okay. That world, especially if you’re trying to be expansive about it, from the normal, ordinary, everyday, relatable sorts of things, like breakfast.
[00:11:48] Julian: The other thing that you want to do is not just kind of go willy nilly about breakfast and boxes of cereal, but try to make a connection between the big topics. That you might be looking at, so, you know, if you have a trends report, uh, that’s saying things, uh, about Metaverse, this is where the, the actual work happens, is you need to connect the research, the kind of wondering, the, uh, the analysis of that possible future to a box of cereal.
[00:12:19] Julian: So how do you connect your big, uh, you know, research study about the future of work and Metaverse to a box of cereal? And that’s the work, making that big expansive leap to associate the insights that have been gathered from the research and then integrate them into that box of cereal. It might be something that indicates how the packaging was manufactured.
[00:12:42] Julian: It might be something that implies in the ingredients where the ingredients came from. It might be something as normal that we all sort of understand and appreciate but don’t think it has anything to tell us about the world about the packaging design. Thank you for your time. So what’s going on in the packaging design that is associated with Metaverse?
[00:13:01] Julian: Is there a fun game that kids play? Because of some illustration on the box of cereal. All these kinds of things are ways in which you translate the serious, analytic, rational,
[00:13:17] Julian: And then, the box of cereal becomes an augmentation, in addition to, a richer way of representing that research. It’s not the only thing. It’s not where you stop. You don’t just say, Hey, thanks for all that research. Our result is this box of cereal. You say in order to help translate the meaning of this, to help you make sense of this huge three ring binder of research, we also made a box of cereal.
[00:13:42] Julian: We made a menu from a fast food restaurant from the future. We made a set of instructions for a headset. That goes along with the metaverse. Here’s an article from a newspaper that is talking about some of the implications of metaverse. You might even do the whole newspaper because in the newspaper, beautiful container of, of a moment in time of a culture, you can have one ads.
[00:14:04] Julian: What are the new kinds of jobs in this world? And you’re creating this really wonderful way in which. Decision makers, stakeholders and creative teams and all the aspects, all the stakeholders involved in Metaverse, let’s say, can bring themselves to the project and bring themselves in a, in an exceptionally creative way.
[00:14:22] Julian: Because one of the things that we’ve maybe need to pay more attention to is this existentially vital gift that we all have, which is the ability to imagine and bringing imagination back into collaboration with the analytics and the research and the Desires for innovation, I think is, is absolutely necessary.
[00:14:41] Julian: And it’s something that I’ve seen and strongly believe that design fiction is able to do.
[00:14:46] Marty: I have to admit after our conversation about it, I was so excited. I went to our world building team. We’re working on a project on being human 2045. And the idea is what is the world going to look like in 2045? And then we’ll put the human there.
[00:14:59] Marty: So we did our project on, or I, I called it a homework assignment for the group. You know, soup of the future. What’s going to suit going to look like in 2045? And the goal was, well, what’s the material that the can is made out of? Is it even a can anymore? What is it served in? How has it created? Is it microwavable?
[00:15:18] Marty: Is it automatic? Is it generated? Is it whatever, what are the ingredients? And. Trying to show, you know, what’s going to be important. The values of the time may be pointed out with the soup. And I thought was really interesting about it, which leads to another question for you is some people were very, very much visionary around it saying, I think the world should all be vegetarian in 20 years.
[00:15:42] Marty: So it used only vegetarian ingredients or vegan. So some people took kind of their personal perspectives and put it into the soup. Others were thinking, okay, we’re going to live in a dystopian society. So our soup is not going to have, you know, these outlandish ingredients. They’re going to be really, really basic.
[00:15:59] Marty: Cause that’s all we’re going to have left in the world after AI destroys it or whatever. I’m curious about what kind of inputs you use when you start using design fiction. Do you use a trend spotting? Methodology or a futuristic methodology, or is it more of, Hey, let’s just use our imagination and just kind of think what the future could be or should be.
[00:16:22] Julian: So it is typically both, but I’ll tell you that the kind of tool chain, I rely heavily on imagination, but the input to that, if it was like a process diagram would be like the input is the research. So depending on the kind of program that might be happening, the research might be like a proper, well funded research program.
[00:16:46] Julian: Right, that does a lot of consumer market studies, does trends analysis, tries to identify the hot items that are kind of coming down. The imagination part is the translation of those into the design fiction artifact. That’s the, the menu or the box of cereal or the, uh, help wanted ad in the newspaper and so forth and so on.
[00:17:08] Julian: The tricky part is there’s a bit of a setup that happens. I think we’re all born into a world where it’s like the future is either at some point a utopia or dystopia. And I think that’s the explicit, explicitly the wrong way to think about it. I think that the worlds that we live in from very many different perspectives are very many different perspectives.
[00:17:26] Julian: Yeah. One person’s dystopia. So that’s not really helpful to rely on a binary. So I like to just think of the world as, as you might experience it. When you wake up in the morning, there’s good things and there’s bad things. The world is a contingent place. It is filled with these kind of moments in which, uh, at one point there’s incredible darkness and despair and sadness, while simultaneously there’s beauty.
[00:17:53] Julian: and expansive potential and possibility. And we live in these worlds and try to find the way when we have a well adjusted psyche to hold all these things together at, you know, one moment. And it’s an incredible burden. It’s very, very difficult, but we’ve developed, you know, that ability again, to the degree that we’ve got a well adjusted sort of psyche to recognize that fear and anger don’t lead us as individuals into very good places.
[00:18:18] Julian: Great places and states of mind. Um, at the same time, if we are well adjusted, we’re kind of pulled into recognizing that this exists in the world and we find our way to, to manage it. And that can vary from making decisions about what kind of work you’re going to do to what kind of car you’re going to drive.
[00:18:36] Julian: To, you know, what kind of organization you’re going to help out with, uh, volunteering and all these kinds of things. So I think that the approach of like, you know, saying the world’s going to end and this is what it’s going to look like doesn’t really help, right? Cause it kind of takes you into a darker place in the same way that imagining that everything is perfect and we’re going to have flying cars that also doesn’t really help because the hard work is in between.
[00:18:58] Marty: I got to say, when you were talking about the dangers of fear and anger. As a star Wars geek, my mind went to Yoda. So of course, but I’ll get us back on track.
[00:19:08] Julian: I mean that, and you know, Yoda is absolutely right. I mean, that, that’s an important thing to hold on to. And also I’ll just say, it’s like, I think there, there are these beautiful stories that, that offer us lessons.
[00:19:18] Julian: And we think about the future star Wars is one of them, or, you know, at least moments of it and the Yoda line, which I can’t quite quote, but it was like, fear leads to anger, anger leads to. Hate, maybe something like that.
[00:19:30] Marty: Anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side. Yeah,
[00:19:32] Julian: it leads to the dark side.
[00:19:34] Julian: That’s a truism.
[00:19:35] Marty: I love it. We’ll just end on that. So if we can end on Star Wars, I’m good. Actually. So what we tried to do with the soup is we led to that other level, which was trying to get more details around the world building what we did is okay. What’s family dinner going to look like? Whether family dinner is once a year at a holiday, and that’s what somebody thinks family dinner is.
[00:19:55] Marty: Family dinner is just the two of us. With a TV dinner, watching TV that kind of tells you how old I am or whatever family dinner means to you, you know, who’s going to be there, who’s going to serve it, what are the dishes, what is the food, what are people talking about at the table, typically, that’s going to tell you the social and political goings on of the world.
[00:20:16] Marty: Have you ever done an exercise like that? We’re just imagining. Kind of what a group of people would do together an event, or is that kind of beyond design fiction and maybe moving into another realm?
[00:20:26] Julian: I think that there are things that can come out of experiences like that. So you can be expansive about what design fiction is.
[00:20:33] Julian: Um, I think of it as, as the artifact. So, um, I would be imagining the artifacts that you kind of touched on, you know, for the purposes of bringing additional value to whatever kind of work. So the thing that you’re describing makes me think of, okay, we’re going to do a little scenario. We might even do a little role playing.
[00:20:50] Julian: And I think in addition to just sort of playing things out and wondering about the scenario, I tend to focus on at some level, like the microscopic details. So. Let’s say we were to write that out as a short story, this experience. Now I think we’re doing less design fiction, we’re doing more fiction. But at the same time, in my story representation, I want to see that TV dinner box, right?
[00:21:17] Julian: I want to go through the trouble and time. There’s no trouble. It’s actually, this is the work of actually designing that box. And I’m not designing the box for the sake of having an illustration in the short story. I’m designing the box to understand more about that world. At this level, I can sort of see the box, but I also want to see the illustration of the contents of the TV dinner box.
[00:21:41] Julian: I want to see the way in which it’s sold. I want to see that little badge in the corner that it used to say, as seen on TV, what does it say now? What are the ways in which this box can represent the full expanse of all the things you’re talking about, as well as the other things, like maybe you’re sitting down at dinner and, you know, one person says like, Hey, check out this article I read.
[00:22:03] Julian: And they push in front of you a, uh, a folded magazine open to a particular page. And now you’re talking about like, Okay. What are people reading about? What excites them enough to share it across the table or concerns them enough to share it across the table? I want to make the props for the film. Let’s put it that way.
[00:22:18] Julian: If this were a film, I want to make the props, but I want them to be meaningful and full of the kind of responses to the question. They might not answer them completely, but they imply that this is a world that people live in. It’s a world in which people exchange value for something else. You know, in this case, you might exchange some form of value for that box of TV dinner.
[00:22:38] Julian: They experience and sort of engage each other. In what context are they all sitting around a table? Is one of them beaming in through You know, new gig off kind of technology, all these kinds of questions you suggested that you have people, you know, they’re exposed to this, they see it, they read it, they see it on as a little short film and then they’re wondering about it.
[00:22:59] Julian: And then you also do that beautiful thing of like bringing their attention to the props. So you can imagine like doing this whole thing and at the end of it, you know, if this were a book, it’s like, There’s a set of pages, like, here are all the 15 objects from that world. Here’s the TV dinner. Here’s the device that allowed Uncle Chester to kind of beam in from wherever he was.
[00:23:19] Julian: Here’s a Help Wanted ad. From that magazine that got pushed across the table and so forth. So you, you just kind of enliven it. You bring a richness to the wondering about family dinner, 2045.
[00:23:33] Marty: I guess it leads me to this question of the chicken and the egg question. So you were talking about when you create props of maybe what a newspaper will look like in the future.
[00:23:42] Marty: Or the TV dinner is going to look like in the future. Don’t you need to know overall what the future is going to look like, or do the props kind of build the future view for you?
[00:23:54] Julian: Yeah. So this is where it’s almost like back to the archeology analogy and not an archeologist, but you know, you, you see enough shows and documentaries, you get a sense of what’s going on.
[00:24:05] Julian: Typically. One of the reasons why I like archeology is in a very kind of like focused, almost like ritualized way. They are digging through the earth to find evidence of worlds that once exists, cultures, community settlements, uh, these kinds of things. And they’ve got no one to talk to. They can’t, it’s not like they’re going to dig through the ground and find someone who’s like, Oh, thanks for digging me up.
[00:24:28] Julian: Let me tell you all about my world. They’re finding evidence of it in these kind of, you know, materials, scraps, like whatever is left behind, uh, that survived the ages. And then they’re asking that thing, you know, they’re pondering it, they’re looking at it, they’re wondering, using their expertise and speculating about what could have been.
[00:24:48] Julian: What is this thing? And so I think to me, the chicken or egg thing is more like I’ve found evidence of some possible world and you have to really use your imagination to wonder about what the shape of these things might be. You make certain assumptions. So I keep saying newspaper, maybe because my dad was a newspaper man.
[00:25:06] Julian: It’s like still with me that it’s like these containers of very many aspects of the world. Now I’m less interested in the thing of like people saying like, well, the newspapers exist in the future. That’s beside the point. I’m not saying that this is actually a newspaper. I’m saying this is a wonderful container that we can all relate to.
[00:25:21] Julian: It’s grounded in our experience. Whether or not we believe ideas will be printed on paper or all these kinds of things is a distraction from the important question, which is like, we need to find a way to imagine into possibility. And this just happens to be one crutch. You dig this thing up. So it’s more like finding the way to bring your imagination into the question, not wondering from the top down, do I need to build the world before I can create the objects?
[00:25:48] Julian: It’s really imagining the world from the bottom up. And I think it’s a kind of back and forth. So an organization like Gardner might have big takes and analyses and trends about. The future, let’s say, you know, VR, let’s say, or augmented reality, is there as an emerging trend. Now, can you translate those?
[00:26:08] Julian: Do you have the imagination and the vision and the audacity to say, cool, that’s interesting. Tell me what a help wanted ad looks like in that future. And that’s the work. So it’s both, you know, the chicken and the egg are there at the same time. The chicken is like the macro scale, big trend. And then you’re wondering about.
[00:26:27] Julian: Well, um, I found this egg, but I didn’t find the chicken.
[00:26:31] Marty: As a futurist, and I don’t know what the term would be, design fictionist, designer I guess. But what excites you the most about the future right now? What are you working on that you’re building some design artifacts around and that excites you about the future?
[00:26:46] Julian: Yeah. So very much on mind is AI. And so I am fascinated by it. Bewildered, curious, cautious, uh, concerned all these things simultaneously. And I am not digging myself in on either side of the question. I’m neither a zealot. Nor am I, you know what? We need to destroy it. I’m more bewildered in a beautiful way, an expansive way about what could be.
[00:27:12] Julian: And also fascinated that we’re in this moment when there is lots of chaos and confusion and, you know, back to Yoda, anger and fear is like, okay, this is a moment in which culture is. Is at some vanguard and we are in the midst of an evolution of some sort. It might not be like a epistemic evolution, but there’s something going on.
[00:27:33] Julian: And so as a design fiction, as a designer, who’s, who has stakes in wondering about the future and just also happens to be an engineer. I started imagining what this world might look like, but I’m going to do it in a very particular way. So actually working on a project now, uh, with a client to imagine into the future of AI in the form of a magazine that’s come from that world.
[00:27:55] Julian: So the magazine becomes the design fiction artifact and you can represent. The perspective and your sort of take and your sort of instinct about what that future might look like in the form of a magazine, but you know, it can’t be be a magazine. That’s just like a future vision video kind of thing. It can’t be a magazine that is so cautionary.
[00:28:15] Julian: It just feels like the world is kind of falling apart. You have to kind of cut through the middle. And find ways to represent the various kind of perspectives and points of view all in one container. Both, you know, the good and the bad, if you want to put it that way, but one person’s good is another person’s bad.
[00:28:30] Julian: So it becomes really kind of fun and fascinating to have a counterpoint article. Like, you know, two people kind of wondering about a particular experience or doing product reviews, they can be good products and they’d be bad products all at the same time. And so this becomes a wonder, you know, wait. So that’s something that I’m really fascinated with.
[00:28:50] Julian: I think we do not have a very vivid, engaging. imaginary of an AI future. I mean, you, you kind of Google AI and you just get a bunch of these kind of ridiculous robots all in kind of ultraviolet or blue light. There’s no shared imaginary about what a future in a world in which AI is as normal, ordinary, and everyday, and as exciting, fascinating, and confusing as a world in which, you know, everyone’s got a remote control for the television.
[00:29:18] Julian: What happens when AI is just normal. It’s like wheels on luggage. It’s just something that you take for granted. And I think that’s hard work, but it’s the important work to do. And I think it’s, it’s one area where you really sort of get a sense of like, wow, we really, our imagination is pathetic. If we’re relying on just these very simplistic representations of what that world is.
[00:29:40] Julian: We’ve kind of lost something. We’ve lost again, this sort of existentially vital skill, this thing that is a great unlock for us as humans, which is our ability to imagine it unlocks our greatness. And it really is like our evolutionary advantage that we’re currently, you know, my perspective is we’re ignoring that.
[00:29:59] Marty: So where do you start? You’ve got this magazine idea. I mean, what do you use as inputs to, to figure that out?
[00:30:06] Julian: Okay, so in this one particular project, there are a few inputs. One of them is we have contributors, and so the contributors range across the map from journalists who have some stake in kind of representing the world’s science fiction writers.
[00:30:19] Julian: There are kind of leaders of various organizations that are either directly or indirectly involved. You know, have some stake in the AI future. So that’s people from the kind of public policy world, people from the private sector, uh, venture capitalists, journalists, and, and journalists with, with a very expansive.
[00:30:39] Julian: Um, kind of set of principles and approaches to the kind of stories that they write. There are educators, um, so a lot of that, so that, that’s real human kind of input and trying to do the work to say, you need to think a little bit harder about how you would want to represent your perspective and your take on the world.
[00:30:57] Julian: This isn’t just a place to write an opinion piece. You have to imagine you’re in that world and you are writing the opinion piece or you’re in this world. So we have one, one guy. who’s a product reviewer. Like that’s what, that’s his professional life. He reviews tech products. And so now he’s working with another contributor who’s an industrial designer to begin to imagine into that future of what these kinds of products might be in this world.
[00:31:20] Julian: I’m talking, you know, like both services, but also like devices and represent those as if they actually exist in the world. And, you know, some of them are great and some of them get one star. So what does that world look like? And then as well, just gathering, doing that kind of desk research that is kind of harvesting the conversations, the debates, the concerns, the, you know, all the newsletters that are out there in the world about people sort of wondering about AI, listening to the podcast, what feels like things that might exist in this world.
[00:31:50] Julian: And then again, that’s the hard work of design fiction, translating those into something that feels grounded, that feels like it is of the world.
[00:31:58] Marty: Alright, I thought I had a fun job, but that sounds incredibly, incredibly fun and insightful. I can’t wait to see what comes out of that.
[00:32:07] Julian: Yeah. And I’ll just add that that’s a really beautiful one because we’re doing it because we want to put a magazine in people’s hands.
[00:32:14] Julian: It’s a public thing by that. I mean, it’s not like a piece of proprietary work just for one organization. We set that out from the, from the outset. So you know, it’s commissioned work, but it’s like, it’s gotta be public work because we want to open up the discussion and conversation at two levels. One is AI.
[00:32:31] Julian: What is the vision of it? Besides. Elon and Marx and, you know, the people who are the expansive dreamers. We also want to show what it looks like when you have a variety of perspectives on the future that are, again, it’s a contingent. It’s like, it’s everything’s at once. And then we also want to amplify the value of this particular approach to doing futures oriented work.
[00:32:54] Julian: I appreciate that you see that it’s like fun work. The hope is. That this kind of work and this approach to doing futures becomes more normalized. It’s not seen as just like, Oh, you know, there’s one weird project that there’s one weird. Venice beach, you know, creative agency does. It’s something that becomes part of the toolkit for people like you and me who are doing futures work.
[00:33:16] Julian: It’s just normal.
[00:33:17] Marty: So when do you expect this to publish and where do you think our, uh, listeners can kind of track this project?
[00:33:24] Julian: Yes. So the best place to track it is just following along at, um, Neo4j laboratory. So it’s got various channels, anything between the newsletter and all those kinds of things.
[00:33:34] Julian: And the expectation is that we’ll be done with production late summer, and then we’ll manufacture it, actually print it, manufacture, I mean, print it.
[00:33:43] Marty: Very cool. Very much looking forward to it. Unfortunately, time is flying and we’re running out of time. So I have one more ask of you, which is something I ask all of our guests.
[00:33:55] Marty: If you had to leave our listeners with one golden nugget, what would it be?
[00:33:59] Julian: We need to remind ourselves that we have this existentially vital skill capability. That is imagination. We’ve got this wonderfully confusing piece of vascularized meat in our heads, and it has the ability to imagine the world otherwise.
[00:34:15] Julian: And we need to get back to that. We need to remember that we have this ability to sense into and see the world in ways that maybe when we were younger, we were able to do. You know, the old story about, you know, you unwrap gifts for, from a birthday or whatever. And what becomes more interesting than the gift is the box that it came in or the tube that the wrapping paper came in.
[00:34:37] Julian: Getting back to that sense that recognizing that where our greatness lies is in our imagination. And so finding the way to kind of tap back into that. And bring it into conversation with the hard material making practices, you know, the job that we have bringing that into that fold. So that imagination and what I refer to as structure are in a rich conversation, one and the other, working towards trying to find ways to materialize the worldly change that we need in order to, well, survive.
[00:35:08] Marty: Well, Julian, I really appreciate. The time today, I’m really looking forward to seeing what you produce in the summer and in the future. So thank you for your time today. I appreciate it.
[00:35:18] Julian: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks for talking Marty.
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