A podcast conversation recorded while I was at Innovation Land Summit in Colombia. We look at the intersection of research, creativity, and practical implementation in driving innovation within organizations. There is a necessity to be explicit about the role of imagination, which I see as a kind of muscle that requires regular exercise to stay strong. Imagination is that which allows us to envision and develop new ideas, strategies, products, services, and brand evolutions. Through the lens of practical examples, such as the collaborations Near Future Laboratory has done with IKEA and the creation of innovative analog-digital devices, the our discussion gets into how imaginative thinking can lead to meaningful change. Of course 'Design Fiction' is centered as a method for organizations to forecast and strategically plan for the future, focusing on everyday, ordinary experiences as a foundation. Educating organizations and the broader community to adopt and integrate creative methodologies, helps ensure that innovation is not an accidental occurrence, but a structured and intentional process.
When I was in Colombia for a keynote with the ANDI folks for their Innovation Land Summit, I sat down to have a conversation with their team for their wonderful podcast. Fun experience sort of on a stage above a teeming crowd of folks looking at exhibits, talking to vendors, drinking coffee all the while sitting in these slighly oversized cartoon chairs that made me feel like a kid. Which is great. Because we were talking about that thing that many of us had in spades when we were younger — imagination.
In this episode, Julian Bleecker discusses the insights from his research on innovation and the future at the Innovation Land Summit in Colombia. He shares his background, the concept of Design Fiction, and the work of the Near Future Laboratory. Bleecker also elaborates on his collaboration with IKEA and his philosophy on integrating analog and digital worlds. The conversation touches on the importance of imagination in innovation and the everyday aspects of future planning. Bleecker provides a grounded view on future scenarios, emphasizing practical, day-to-day experiences over apocalyptic visions.
00:00 Introduction to Research Insights
00:54 Welcome to the Innovation Land Summit
01:13 Meet Julian Bleecker
02:15 The Concept of Design Fiction
04:31 Challenges in Implementing Future Thinking
06:44 Case Study: IKEA’s Future Exploration
10:36 The Role of Imagination in Innovation
15:19 Analog and Digital Worlds Collide
18:32 Philosophical Views on Future Technology
22:19 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
[00:00:00] Julian: And some of our research insights and the highlights, the things that the organization wants to respond to. I mean, they don’t do the research just because it’s fun or they like to travel. They’re trying to find new knowledge, new opportunities for developing new products and services, and even evolving the brand.
[00:00:16] Julian: What I want to focus on is what does it feel like to live in that world? Because we don’t think about those details. If we’re just a human who wakes up in the morning and just wants to listen to the news on the radio. We just think about what it is, what is it like to wake up in the morning in a world in which there’s AI.
[00:00:32] Julian: Once one was being able to imagine a world in which analog and digital came together.
[00:00:54] Interviewer: Julian, hello. Hello, very nice to be here. Welcome to Colombia. Thank you. Welcome to the Innovation Land Summit. This annual event to talk about innovation, future, and all related with digital transformation. Is your first time in Colombia? First time in Colombia, it’s beautiful here. Ah, you like it. Please share with our audience a little bit who, who is Julian Bleecker?
[00:01:18] Julian: Yeah. Oh, that’s a big question. At least what you, what do you and Bleecker? Um, well, so Julian Bleecker is a, is a creative guy. He’s got a background in engineering and, uh, very much interested in how we create new ideas and how those new ideas lead us into what I refer to as more habitable worlds, worlds that we.
[00:01:44] Julian: Feel a little bit more human. We are able to enjoy ourselves and, uh, tap into this kind of innate quality of I think every human, which is to be creative and to imagine and to dream of possibility. So I’m very interested kind of combining that more kind of spiritual reflection with the, the realities of actually making things.
[00:02:06] Julian: And I think that’s when I bring together my engineering and design expertise and experience. And so. That’s what, that’s what he is. That’s what he does.
[00:02:15] Interviewer: Well, additionally, you are one of the creators of this practice of design fiction. That is something to trying to design the future with tools, with methods, and you as well are the founder of some collective of guys who are called the Near Future Laboratory.
[00:02:32] Interviewer: Can you share us a little bit what kind of people were in the Near Future Laboratory? What they do there inside each day?
[00:02:39] Julian: Yeah, well, um, so now the Near Future Laboratory is effectively just me. Um, there was like an evolution of the organization to where, uh, I kind of wanted to focus more on working and doing learning and development and try to bring different kinds of programs into the clients that I was working with.
[00:02:57] Julian: And so, uh, at this time it’s, it’s, uh, it’s an organization that’s built around essentially a large community. Of people rather than just a small group of just a few people. I’m trying to find a way to host a conversation. Let’s say about what creativity is and how we can operate and bring that into the kinds of organizations that can bring about meaningful change in the world.
[00:03:21] Julian: And so when I do learning development programs like different kinds of seminars that we do. Uh, summits and retreats all in an effort to try to not just do the work of creating an innovative new product, but helping organizations learn how to do that. And I think that’s one of the key aspects of what New Future Laboratory does is almost to a certain degree, not entirely, but a bit of a Educational angle to it, learning and development, um, reminded, trying to spread the tools and the resources.
[00:03:52] Julian: That’s why we have the books and trying to use that as a resource to help not just keep this idea of design fiction. Closed and proprietary to a small group of people, but something that actually becomes just part of the language by which organizations do the work that they do, maybe a bit the way that design thinking, but definitely not the same as design thinking, but that just became a part of the vernacular part of the language that people did when they thought about how do we innovate?
[00:04:18] Julian: What are the techniques and approaches and resources and processes? And I think wanted to find a way that design fiction could become that. It has been one of the primary ambitions of the Near Future Laboratory.
[00:04:31] Interviewer: We’re in Latin America, in, in Colombia. We are Latin, and sometimes we assume the futures have something that just happened.
[00:04:39] Interviewer: Uh, you can structure, in a structured way, go there. And my question is, with this mindset, with this cultural background, how you see our, our big challenges in your own experience to introduce in the real day by day of companies Methyl, a more structured process to think about the future and not just an accident.
[00:05:02] Julian: Yeah. Um, well, I think you bring up a really interesting point. I, I’m not sure. I think it’s maybe somewhat like a global phenomenon to imagine that the future is sort of in a way already planned or there’s a particular trajectory to it where you’re going to go from one step and then we do a little bit more work and now we’re, we’ve, we’ve got from the, from the moon to Mars and we think about the future and, and essentially ways that.
[00:05:27] Julian: The way I look at it is, um, to certainly be like someone else’s dream about what could be, someone else’s dream about what the next step is. I think one of the things that we’re all challenged by is reminding ourselves that all of us each individually, uh, within organizations can dream other ways. We can imagine into possibility according to, let’s say, a different script.
[00:05:50] Julian: Um, it doesn’t have to just be the dream of the future that, let’s say, uh, Elon Musk has. There can be other ways of thinking about what we want next, what we’d like to see and how we’d like to see the worlds that we have to inhabit, um, occupy. And I think one of the things that, that is, that is a challenge to all of us is reminding ourselves, not only reminding ourselves, but we’re learning again, how to dream and not just a childish, playful way, but in very practical ways.
[00:06:20] Julian: And I think organizations are able to do that as well. You needn’t follow a path that has just been prescribed. Uh, ahead of time, the innovation happens when you dream outside of what you expected when you look at the unanticipated possibilities and finding the way to bring that kind of, uh, let’s say that D.
[00:06:39] Julian: N. A. Within the organization is maybe one of the bigger challenges
[00:06:44] Interviewer: you work with a lot of companies in the United States, big corporation, all different sectors. Can you choose one case, one example of which company had you were in the past in who visualize after you? Future of possible future. And then you build a product or a service based on that kind of methodologies.
[00:07:05] Julian: Trying to think of an example I can talk about. I think, I think the, the, the most, um, perhaps relevant public example is, uh, work with Ikea.
[00:07:13] Interviewer: Okay.
[00:07:14] Julian: Um, so there were, there were a couple of things going on. One was, uh, just introducing to Ikea, the possibility that they can explore the future with the resources and materials and essentially brand.
[00:07:26] Julian: Uh, assets that they have. And that’s of course, the IKEA catalog, which is no longer printed. It used to be printed by the time it was something that was, you’d see it everywhere, people understood and getting the organism, getting IKEA to think of the catalog is essentially a representation of their vision of what home life was like now, from a brand perspective, that’s very valuable.
[00:07:51] Julian: Like it’s essentially saying here are values about materials. About ways in which we do logistics, about style, all those kinds of elements that were something that was represented in that. And then so then getting the organization to imagine that they can tell the same story but from the future, and using that as a way for them internally to begin to think strategically about what do we want to do in the future.
[00:08:16] Julian: And all the kind of aspects of, you know, What they do and how they can have less than environmental impact, um, be a more joyful component of people’s whole life. So that was what that was essentially one project. And that led a few years later to another project where they said, that was kind of fun. We like what happened there.
[00:08:33] Julian: It was a little bit of a small, almost like a side project. Uh, now we’d like to use that same approach for one of the biggest projects that we do, which for them is they do one of those world’s largest in home, uh, kind of consumer surveys. They call it the In Home Research Project. Very expansive, very rich, ethnographic, they send people all around the world, do lots of in home interviews, a lot of rich media is created, uh, tons and tons of interviews are transcribed and analyzed, and then they have this idea, it’s like, why don’t we take some of that research result and try to represent it as if some of these aspects of these worlds people were talking about, and some of our research insights and the highlights, the things that the organization wants to respond to.
[00:09:18] Julian: I mean, they don’t do the research just because it’s fun or they like to travel. They’re trying to find new knowledge, new opportunities for developing new products and services and even evolving the brand. So rather than just writing a report and saying, here are the 10 key takeaways from this one year report, they decided to actually make elements that might appear in a catalog.
[00:09:41] Julian: And that became a great way to communicate both internally. So they made this, the actual book that contains this information. It was made public. So it was not only communicating internally to the organization and to the employees, the key stakeholders, the CEO, and so forth, but it was also a way for them to sort of represent to the public.
[00:10:00] Julian: So it became this great, almost like, uh, not just a great, um, value for what it did and how it, how it created a kind of vision and almost a roadmap. For them and a way of thinking, but it was also a remarkable communications tool because it got them to show their entire marketplace. Look, we’re thinking about the future.
[00:10:19] Julian: We take it seriously and we’re not just going to say, Hey, we’re going to be more concerned about environmental impact or we were not listening. You know, we’re, um, we’re listening to you about your needs for the ways in which you want to live at home. We’re going to show you what we’re thinking about and seeing how that might integrate into our future plans.
[00:10:36] Interviewer: Let’s talk about imagination because you give us a gift today and in this summit, you say imagination goes before innovation and you have a podcast. I follow your podcast, the Neo Future Laboratorio, and I see that you make some exercise with your invite people to talk in the podcast and you always say, imagine a future in which, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, imagine a future in which blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:11:02] Interviewer: Um, And it’s part of your method you use, always just explore as an exercise the imagination. And this ability of this kind you can train in organization, in people. What do you think about it?
[00:11:18] Julian: Uh, that’s one part of it. It’s a, it’s almost like a, um, a warm up exercise. It’s something that has to happen. So it’s just like, uh, I think sometimes I think of the, the, the imagination as a muscle.
[00:11:31] Julian: For It’s like a metaphor, and just like a muscle, you need to, you can’t just wake up in the morning and go for a run. You need to stretch, and you need to also be prepared that maybe you’re not as physically fit as you thought you were, so it’s going to be a little bit harder. But if you keep doing it over and over again, just even simple exercises, or if you go to the gym, you do stretches, and then you start with a smaller weight, and then work yourself up until you get physically more able to do the longer run.
[00:12:00] Julian: Or jump higher or play, play ball better. So I think these exercises that I do are very much like that. They, they, it’s almost like if you haven’t done it, it hurts. Mm hmm. And that’s the point of sort of saying, like, just a simple exercise. Imagine the future of, um, in an AI world, let’s say. Uh, now ask yourself, um, what, what kind of sneakers do I put on in the morning?
[00:12:26] Julian: And people might not be, they might be like, I think that’s the wrong question. What you meant to ask was. Um, uh, how many, how many, uh, how many megahertz does the computer run? And what you meant to ask was, uh, how good is the AI at translating from one language to another? Is that I don’t want to focus too much on that detail.
[00:12:44] Julian: What I want to focus on is what does it feel like to live in that world? Because we don’t think about those details if we’re just a human who wakes up in the morning and just wants to listen to the news on the radio. We just think about what it is, what is it like to wake up in the morning in a world in which there’s AI.
[00:13:01] Julian: And I want to listen to the news and you start asking yourself that really hard question because you’re not quite sure you don’t know the answer, but that’s where the imagination comes in. It’s just, just imagine what it could be like, put yourself almost like close your eyes and put yourself into that state of, okay, I’ve just woken up.
[00:13:19] Julian: What am I thinking about? How do I think I might, from what little I know about AI, let’s say you’re not an engineer. You’ve never played with it. You only heard about it. Just try it. It’s almost like that first step you take. When you decide, you know what? I’m going to take up running. I think it’s going to be good for me.
[00:13:36] Julian: And the first time you go out, it’s like you got all the kit on because you don’t want to look, you don’t want to embarrass yourself. You do some stretches, you look around at other people. What are they doing? How are they running? And then you just start out. And maybe the first little bit you go, you run a little bit too fast.
[00:13:49] Julian: You’re like, Oh man, that hurt. I better walk. Or maybe I should just try another day. Or maybe I should not try to jump all the way in. But you just take little steps at first. And the first times you do it, it’s hard. music ends You’re not sure, you think that there’s a right answer as opposed to a creative answer or a thoughtful answer or just a reflection.
[00:14:08] Julian: You have that tendency to want to prove that you know something when you, it becomes hard as a human to accept like, I don’t know, I have no idea, let’s talk about it, let’s see, what do you think? And you’re just kind of in that playful mode, almost like children. You watch children play or watch them, uh, they could just have a piece of cardboard.
[00:14:27] Julian: And, uh, and a magic marker and maybe, uh, they just started playing around. What do you think this would be? You start doing different ways of experimenting and just saying, okay,
[00:14:37] Interviewer: letting the imagination as a muscle. Yeah. It’ll be very interesting. You used to be entrepreneur change of field because I know how about God with background creating companies as well and, and, and I follow a video and you explain all the creative process where you create these computer cycles, but it’s analog.
[00:14:56] Interviewer: But it’s an electronic device, uh, beyond. I love it because I love cycling, and it was so, so, so beautiful, really. And, and I tried to figure out, if you imagine a future, uh, with digital tools, but it still be classic with analog visualization. How was the process of you create that company, and what happened with that company?
[00:15:19] Julian: Yeah, so it’s a, um, it’s a, it’s a bit of a imagining into a possible world in which, let’s say, Digital and analog were not separate. They were, they were together. And that’s sort of a world that was very easy for me to imagine both as an engineer, because then it became a really interesting problem. Like, how do you do that?
[00:15:40] Julian: And one of the most challenging aspects of the business early on was literally trying to figure out what components you need in order to do that, given all the physical constraints of what I imagined I wanted the product to be in terms of size. And these kinds of things. And so that was, that was very many months of, I’m not sure, I don’t know.
[00:16:05] Julian: And it was actually a connection to, uh, I’m also a photographer, very enthusiastic photographer. I have way too much photo equipment and photo projects going on. And I realized when I was working with my camera, I was like, Whoa, how is this thing moving this heavy glass to do focus in, and then I did a bit of research on how.
[00:16:27] Julian: Lenses, the tiny motors that they have in lenses do the focusing. So it was this kind of connection from an unexpected direction that led me to finding just essentially a different sector of the, of industry that makes tiny motors that turn fairly heavy glass, you know, relatively speaking. And that’s what I needed.
[00:16:46] Julian: I needed something that could have, you know, move mass, uh, very precisely, very refined way, because it’s, it’s almost, it’s got small steps. You don’t want big movements. And you also need to be able to control the movements. Uh, so that was, that was a bunch of things going on at once. One was being able to imagine a world in which analog and digital came together.
[00:17:08] Julian: It almost felt like a parallel universe. Because you ask people about that and they say like, Why not just make it into a smart device with an electronic display? And it’s like, you’re missing the point. This is, you’re talking about the world that you live in. I’m talking about a world that I just visited.
[00:17:23] Julian: And I saw all these beautiful things that brought, brought the classic kind of heritage sensibility and vibe of like analog people who love analog watches, who love motorsport. They might like a fine, uh, Porsche car. Uh, they like mechanical things. This is for them. They live over in this world and there’s not just one world with one trajectory.
[00:17:46] Julian: And that, that offered a bunch of opportunities. So it made the product, uh, first of all, very complicated to manufacture. And then also very desirable in the marketplace because it was truly unique. You had this opportunity in a company like that where everyone else is doing the opposite of what you’re doing.
[00:18:03] Julian: And for a brand, for an entrepreneur, that’s a really beautiful spot to be, where you can essentially market yourself and advertise yourself as not like the other guy. As opposed to, we’re exactly like the other guy, only ours comes in red. That’s not usually enough of a defining characteristic, especially for a new company.
[00:18:22] Interviewer: And it’s still available in the market? No, I made 2, 000 of them. I miss it. Well, my last one, and with that we finish. It’s a more philosophical question related with the future, because when we have this conversation related with future technology. Most of the future scenarios are apocalyp scenarios between human and technology has a conflict.
[00:18:47] Interviewer: Uh, there’s a reality, but I never hear you talking about in your presentation in, in a future, uh, apocalyptic future. Are you optimistic related with the future technology? How you visualize in as a Julian the future in this relation technology and humans?
[00:19:05] Julian: Yeah. I, I, I don’t really take sides. I don’t, I don’t think, I don’t.
[00:19:10] Julian: I do wonder about it sometimes, but I think because I, what I try to do is really ground the future and the everyday experiences, putting your shoes on, deciding what to eat for breakfast, trying to figure out how you’re going to get to work. These kinds of very banal, normal, ordinary, everyday kinds of experiences.
[00:19:29] Julian: And I think that’s what draws me to this idea of design fiction. So I gave the example of the Star Trek one, the thing about the Star Trek, Technical manual, which just makes up these aspects of these beautiful props from this show is that all of a sudden you imagine like, Oh, there must be a guy way down below in the deck in the basement of the starship who has to fix these things.
[00:19:54] Julian: And I love that kind of character of it. That is just this banal aspect of the world, whatever might be going on outside. I think for, uh, you know, there’s the, there’s the, uh, utopian and the apocalyptic. I think the apocalyptic, um, sadly sells. More kind of because you play on people’s fears and their kind of anxieties about the future I think that’s uh, that’s an it’s an interesting aspect and I think there are components of it that are useful to explore I guess maybe more philosophically to ask the question.
[00:20:24] Julian: Why why are we drawn to this? I also, uh, you know, I like a good sci fi action film I was I I got a really wonderful opportunity to help in a very very small way with a With a film by as remarkable director, uh, brad payton Uh, and Jennifer Lopez and it’s a, it’s a sci fi action thriller. It’s just, it’s crazy.
[00:20:44] Julian: It’s, it’s on Netflix now and it’s, it’s super enjoyable, fun. Just kind of like a crazy ride, like an amusement park ride, beautiful film, but the, the beautiful thing about it is when, when the director Brad Payton approached me, he said, um, we just want some help thinking about the future for the art department, which is going to do the props and scene designs and like that.
[00:21:05] Julian: And I was like, okay, you know, I wonder, we’ll see, let’s see what happens. And the brief that I got, the questions that I got, uh, resulted in, I think it’s about a hundred page document that I provided to them. And all the questions were so everyday. You wouldn’t have even guessed for a second that this film was an action thriller with AI robots and, and, and laser beams and all this stuff.
[00:21:29] Julian: He asked me questions like, what would a takeout container be like in the future? And asked me to think about how sustainability and recycling materials would be used. He asked me a question, uh, how would you change the tire on a, on a self driving car in the future? Like, and I think that’s a beautiful aspect of this and where I prefer to sort of focus attention.
[00:21:49] Julian: Uh, the, the big problems are, I’m not saying that they’re not important, but when you’re doing futures work, it’s almost useful to come at it from a bunch of angles. One might be like, if the world’s really great, if the world’s a disaster, the other one might be like. We’ll still be here. We’ll have to wake up in the morning and we’ll have to put on our shoes, about to figure out what we’re going to eat.
[00:22:13] Julian: Let’s start there and ask these kinds of questions, which I think will persist, uh, no matter what happens.
[00:22:19] Interviewer: Julian, thank you for being here in Colombia and Innovation Land. I hope you’ll see you in the later soon. And I’m sure about that. Thank you. Of course. My pleasure. Thank you very much.
