Scratching the Surface Podcast

[00:00:00] Jarrett: Hi, I’m Jarrett Fuller. Welcome to Scratching the Surface.

So I’ve been teaching for a little under 10 years now, and I think every year that I’ve taught, I’ve had students do a project around design fiction, speculative design or critical design. I’ve been inspired by design studios like Dun Raby and Metahaven, and I’m interested in getting students to think about design.

And how they can use their design toolkit outside of traditional commercial practices. Even more than that, I love watching the students discover that these concepts, whether that be design fiction or discursive design or speculative design, they don’t just have to live in galleries or in school projects.

These methodologies actually can have a place in what I would call more traditional design jobs too. My guest today has thought about these ideas, I bet. Longer than anyone else. In 2009, Julian Bleecker published an essay called Design Fiction, a short essay on design, science, fact and fiction, where he developed the concept of design fiction, a term he coined with the science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling.

Bleecker defines design fiction as the act of creating tangible and evocative prototypes from possible near futures to help discover and represent the consequences. Of decision making. He’s written extensively about design fiction in multiple books. Most recently, the Manual of Design Fiction, which he co-wrote with Nick Foster, Nicholas Nova, and Fabian Derrin, and it’s Time to Imagine Harder.

Under his company, near Future Laboratory, Julian works with organizations, companies, and businesses to create design fictions to help them understand their work in new ways. This can mean leading workshops and giving lectures, but it also means prototyping magazines, cereal boxes, product catalogs from the future.

Humans are remarkably bad at acting on abstract futures, he writes, but remarkably good at responding to concrete stories. Design fiction is a way to make these stories concrete. Julian is a fascinating person. He has a background in engineering and a PhD in the history of consciousness. He also founded and then sold Amita, a product design company specializing in analog cycling computers, which he sold in 2022.

And in this conversation, Julian and I talk about. where the ideas that became design fiction came from, how he practices it in corporate settings and how he ensures that design fiction doesn’t become a buzzword like design thinking has in many ways. And we closed this conversation talking about his interest in imagination.

And how we can encourage today’s design students to, in his words, imagine harder. If you like the show and what we do here, you can support our work by joining our sub stack. We have a monthly newsletter that is free for everyone, as well as a paid tier that gets you a bonus interview every month. All of this helps keep the show free for everyone all the time.

Our paying subscribers help us do this work and keep the show going. So if you want more of it in the world, please consider supporting us on our sub stack. You can sign up on our website. Thank you so much for listening. And here is my conversation with Julian bleaker.

I’ve heard you talk about how you often talk with your clients about how, uh, Near future laboratory is a time machine, and you’re sort of going into the future, uh, to grab these objects and bring them back. And I thought it would be interesting to start with a time machine, but to go back in time. And I want to specifically go back to 2005, 20 years ago, when you were teaching in the film school at University of Southern California.

But you were part of a a reading group with other local academics and one day in this reading group, these two academics, a computer scientists and a anthropologist read a paper they were working on that was called Resistance is Futile Reading Science Fiction alongside Ubiquitous Computing. And from what I understand, this paper and hearing that was very revelatory for you.

It sort of changed a lot of how you thought about your work. I’m wondering if you could. Put me back in your shoes in 2005 and bring that artifact to today. Tell me a little bit about what that paper was about and what you were interested in at that time that, you know, made that so interesting to you.

[00:05:14] Julian: Yeah. Um, that’s right. That was, uh, Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, if memory serves, um, who wrote that and it was, uh, presented as a draft to this discussion group of kind of, um, Yeah, faculty kind of up and down the coast in California. So I think Paul was at UC Irvine. Um, I think I’m pretty sure he still is.

And the, the underlying kind of thesis of the paper, very, you know, academic, academic paper, I would say is at the edge of what you could get away with as an, as an academic. Um, yeah, it was like in CS or informatics systems or whatever they call it down there. And what I. That the kernel of it was that they were, uh, these were in the in the group.

Um, I sort of consider myself as well and definitely Paul and, uh, Genevieve were, were had a, an association around what at the time was called Ubiquitous Computing or UBICOMP, which was a thread of research in, uh, that can, that, that sort of brought computer science and sort of anthropology in a way together and design sort of generally, I guess you might say, I don’t know if directly you would, you know, if you point out the community, people used to go to the UBICOMP conference and, um, but it was, it was fascinating because you could do computer science.

Stuff, um, but it was, and it was associating itself with kind of everyday life. What would it be like if the, if computing was ubiquitous? Well, it’s not just a technical problem. Like how do you get networked of, of, of, uh, of a plurality of devices to communicate and, and create, you know, meaning and value and share information.

And what does the data structure look like? It was way more than that. It was more like if, you know, if surfaces were, were computational, what is that? You know, like if, if a, um, if computing isn’t just. With a, with a screen and a keyboard and a mouse, for example, what is that? Like if computing is not just the control system for the ignition of your car, but his other thing, if a book is a computer now, what does that world look like?

And then this opens up these other questions that, you know, just start the mind wandering and wandering about that. So that was sort of, you become generally, I’m probably, you know, missing less stuff, but there’s stuff going on with Xerox park, you know, a lot of like PhD level. Research happening and what Paul and Genevieve were saying in my reading of it was like, of, of, you know, um, let’s look not so much at the, the, the computer science problem or the anthropology problem or the design problem, but like, why is UbiComp?

Why, where did this come from? Not on a theoretical body of knowledge, but who are these people and why are these people talking about it? ubiquitous computing. And what Paula and Genevieve did is they’re like, of course, you know, people of our, you know, of their peer group and roughly, you know, generation in terms of their development as, as humans, like when were they born?

Um, what, what did they study in school? What was the milieu that they were, that they came into consciousness around? And they said, like, look at the cartoons that we watched when we were kids.

Mm hmm.

[00:08:36] Julian: Of course we’re going to try to envision a world that we can inhabit because when we were 8, years old, these are the things that we saw and these were the worlds that we Got so far into that.

We were like, well, this is cool. You know, when you’re like, whoa, this is cool You don’t have the intellectual you haven’t developed enough of the language to understand and translate This this kind of landscape that you’re seeing on television in a cartoon or you know, whatever show 1999 whatever it is You, you just know that it’s cool.

It’s a territory and you, you, you’re adopting some of the vernacular of that territory. Maybe not just in the language, you know, prosaic language, but in the, the feeling that you get of, wouldn’t it be cool to have a control panel that was built into a desk? Cause look, they had, and so then you, you start filling that landscape in with, you know, feeling and imagination, all those kinds of things.

And then as you’re, That’s probably shaping you to say like, I want, whether you know it or not, I want to do stuff that starts to look and feel like that same feeling I had when I was a kid. Cause that’s cool. And man, I would spend my whole life doing that will cool to get that will cool feeling. And so that’s what we’re doing as humans, you know, or is a, as they become computer science people or anthropology people there.

Yeah, we’re always chasing that feeling. We want that feeling back the architecture of their argument around that was so plain and so clear and so obvious, and I wanted to do the same thing. The reason

[00:10:09] Jarrett: I wanted to start there and hear you kind of talk about that influence is you’ve credited that paper with some of your early thinking around what design fiction could be.

And the early framing of this field that really you’ve developed called design fiction, which you, you define as the practice of creating tangible and evocative. Prototypes from possible near futures to help discover and represent the consequences of decision making you’ve also referred to it as sort of a mix of science fact science fiction and design.

I think that’s where that paper influence starts to be clearer. Tell me a little bit about what you were working on at that time when you when you heard that paper and you started to develop some of these ideas. How did design fiction develop in relationship to the work that you were doing then? Yeah,

[00:10:59] Julian: so, um, just prior to moving to California to teach at, at the.

The film school at USC. I was, I was in New York and I was kind of doing sort of, um, middle era. com stuff commercially for, uh, for the most part. And it was an incredible time. Um, because there was so much to kind of figure out and wonder about. And I was also alongside of that where I found a lot of satisfaction was doing a lot of art technology.

So stuff like technology back then. Um, and that was because I understood, I felt its value because you could, and the value was, you can, uh, you can create things with a, with a particular canvas instead of, you know, mechanics and mechanisms, you know, the, to over index on the art metaphor. It’s like, The canvas and the brush and all those kinds of things were things that I understood very well.

And I had a fluency and so I could program the computer. My background is like EE and CS. I could program the computer. I could wire things up. I could make sensors do make computers do things. And that made me, uh, a. And that made me a good collaborator for people who maybe didn’t have that fluency, but had a high creative consciousness.

They’re like, I got this idea for this art project and, you know, maybe I heard that you could, and could we, and you, you know, you do that. And I did, I did like an R and D residency, uh, at, at, at

Eyebeam,

[00:12:31] Julian: which major hub of kind of art technology work at the time. And you start meeting lots of people. And, uh, I, I would say, you know, with, with humility, like I was more than just like a.

The guy who can program the computer. I also had at that point I was, uh, I was a BD from, you know, I’m getting, I’m getting a PhD. So yeah, more than just kind of wire things up. I’m going to want to have conversations about the meaning and value of the kinds of systems that we’re building. Um, and so, so I kind of, I kind of brought that and I think that’s what it’s all about.

That’s what made the USC context work because now I’m now I’m in a, uh, you know, effectively a creative discipline, you know, the film school, which is, which had, you’ve got creative people in there because they’re trying to figure out how to be commercial visual storytellers, which is totally cool and fine.

Um, and so I was bringing that into the, the, to this master’s program specifically focusing on. Helping students recognize the value, not just of the film camera or in the case for a lot of students, the, the game engine,

but

[00:13:37] Julian: what are the other tools and mechanisms and kinds of cameras? It’s not called camera.

It’s called an Arduino. It’s not called, uh, Uh, You know, like a, um, 16 millimeter film, it’s called processing. Um, what are other ways, what are the emerging mechanics? Because at the time they were very much emerging that you can use to help tell visual stories. So a lot of the coursework that I did would be, um, we’re going to learn how, we’re going to learn, uh, how to program, you know, basically.

At a root level. And that quite, wasn’t quite enough for me. That was, that felt a little bit too rote. Um, I don’t think, you know, it was basically, there was an, it was very open time at the department. It’s like, what do you want to do? Do it. You know, we trust you to figure out what’s best to educate our students and that kind of thing.

And so I just started almost by accident. Cause we’re going to learn hardware. We’re going to program an Arduino, um, to, you know, to make an led blink, which is the, you know, the hell world equivalent for. In the hardware space, uh, you know, okay, but what can we do integrating visual storytelling and storytelling generally with these things?

I would, I would prepare a lesson essentially on my, um, on my blog. And that was mostly just like, that’s a great portal to kind of write and people can copy paste stuff. And it was all very rudimentary. Um, and I started writing about the project that we’re going to do. The equivalent of like a readme file for a project.

You might see on GitHub or something like that. But I would write them as entirely fictional narratives. Um, and at the time Battlestar Galactica, everyone was into it. In the version of Basel, I’d be like, we’re going to, this week, we’re going to make a silo detector. And I would, I would, I would play it.

You know, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be like, ha ha, it would just be like, this is what it is. And it was completely goofy. There was, there was, there, it was deliberately almost deliberately like, let’s just try to find the way to layer another imaginative kind of veneer of what we’re doing. So it doesn’t just feel like we’re work.

And I don’t think, you know, it probably didn’t do much more for the students other than just be like, You know, when they got it done, they’d be like, are you asylum? And I was not. You know, around that time, I think just by accident doing that, um, I was doing some futures work, uh, with Institute for the Future, and their work was kind of, they would do these decadal reports, so 10 year, you know, what is 10 year futures, and I always found that fascinating, I loved it because they printed these books, but I also found it a little bit, I felt excluded from that, only insofar as it’s like, well, I want to make something right now, I don’t want to write a paper about what might happen in 10 years, I want to, I feel like the future is Is always imminent.

And so if I can index on the imminent state of the future and use my engineering skills to build something that is technically possible, because look, it works, the code compiles and it runs, but it’s also sort of intellectually or creatively. Uh, at the, at, at some kind of Vanguard to the point where it’s like, I don’t quite understand what’s going on here, but this feels like something that could be,

yeah, it

[00:16:49] Julian: doesn’t right now.

It doesn’t quite click into my, um, when I say my, I’m saying like, maybe just like a more prosaic person looking at it. I don’t quite get it. Like, why would anyone pay for this? And you’re like, I don’t know. There was a time when people didn’t pay for luggage with wheels. But now they seem to be like, maybe we’re just in some, we’ve just crossed the threshold and we’re just at the edge and I’m kind of like looking back and I’m like, Hey folks, I think there’s something interesting going on over here.

I’m trying to establish that there’s this new terrain and I’m calling it this and I’m not sure what it does or I’m not actually, I’m not sure what it’s good for, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to hypothesize that it does have value. And treat it as such,

make it

[00:17:33] Julian: feel like it exists in the world.

That’s what science fiction does. I think, you know, the better science fiction.

[00:17:38] Jarrett: Yeah. I want to come back to that for a second, but I have like a, a really kind of base fundamental question that I just want to. I want to ask you have this background in engineering when you’re in the film school you’re teaching in this interactive media division You’re doing some of this futures work Where did the word design come in to how you think about your work?

Or what is your relationship to that word design or maybe very just simply how do you define design? I’m just curious sort of I’m interested in all these intersections and how does design become a central tenet in all of this work?

[00:18:16] Julian: So, yeah, I wasn’t sure what it was. I think I think back in time, but I remember, um, so also in the study group, you know, reading group was, uh, was Bruce Sterling, right?

Uh, his eminence and he at the time he was doing, he was like futurist and residents or something wonderful like that at the Center College of Design in Pasadena. So just on the, on the, the other side of the county, Los Angeles County. And so he would come over, you know, and so I was, um, I was fascinated by that, by his association with this.

Um, and I, I had had one other, uh, you know, very, very close kind of professionally, um, association with, uh, with him. Another science fiction writer, Neil Stevenson, when I was doing my master’s work in, in, uh, in Seattle at the University of Washington, he was kind of a, um, very, very warmly welcome, uh, you know, hanger on associate, um, at this VR startup that I was at called world design and say, and it was in the same community that he lived in.

It was in Ballard and he would, he would come by. It’s just like, wow, what’s a science fiction writer doing here? I don’t, I don’t quite get it. And then you very quickly realize like, Oh, this is, Yeah. He’s, he’s not just doing kind of field research or whatever, just kind of studying the, the, the experts. Um, this, he’s, he’s absolutely fascinated with at a technical level as well.

And his way of expressing his interest and fascination and imagining the stories is he’s happens to be an exceptional. Uh, prose based storyteller who actually writes it, which is nuts. Um, so I, I, I had a, you know, a little sense of like, okay, this sort of makes sense that a science fiction writer is in this mostly academic discussion group.

Um, there were technology people, there were people from the production, uh, from the sort of critical theory critical theory department. Um, and And so I had been assigned to be a reader for a paper that he was working on. And if memory serves, it was where he was, it was essentially kind of articulating some of the experiences that he was having hanging around designers.

And And I was, I was fascinated by that and, and he, I was going to respond to this paper and I was incredibly concerned that I would flub and be nervous and that kind of stuff. And I was kind of reading my reflections. I can’t remember what they were. They’re probably in some hard drive someplace. I’m responding to open up the discussion in this kind of seminars context.

And I remember just like kind of looking and kind of reading and kind of, you know. Maybe looking up every once in again to kind of expand on a thought and this is very sort of formal informal group and I remember looking at Bruce and He was so deeply engaged. It’s like oh my god, like he he’s not like Right, right And I was like, whoa, I was like, oh we’re connecting we’re really connecting at this one level and I just and we became fast friends after that and I remember Sitting with him, you know, months, maybe it was a year later, who knows at a, at a conference in, um, in Amsterdam, we were sort of talking about this and I was trying to figure out how do I, maybe I’d written like my essay by then.

Okay.

[00:21:40] Julian: Probably not. Cause I remember him saying like, I remember asking, like, I asked, you know, why are you at ArtCenter? Like, why aren’t you at like the Iowa Writers Academy or something? Where writers go to and he’s like, well, I want to learn about design. And I remember that just kind of making my head explode a little bit.

Ah. And I felt like naive in the sense that, oh, you can like learn new things despite the fact that you’re an award winning writer. And he was, you know, I like, he’s the beginner’s mind. Like, let me just see, let me hang around designers and see what’s going on. Um, and, and, and so I sort of wondered the inverse.

I was like, can an engineer learn about telling. Stories about the future, like a science fiction writer. And he said, yeah, just call it design fiction. I was like, that sounds right. And I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have considered myself a designer, even to the point of like, not really understanding what it is, what they do.

[00:22:31] Jarrett: I think in the last two decades, these ideas have, uh, permeated across the design industry, across. Academia that we have, um, you know, speculative design and, and done in rabies sort of have done a lot of work in that space there’s critical design. There’s design futures, there’s discursive design. This is maybe a semantic question, but how do you see design fiction fitting into this larger landscape of.

Um, futures design, critical design, speculative design, how, how do these all overlap with each other? Do you have a sense of how they diverge? Often these terms are used interchangeably, but they don’t quite feel like they’re totally interchangeable. Can you just sort of talk to me how you kind of think about this space today and how design fiction, uh, kind of silos in there?

[00:23:25] Julian: Yeah. Um, so. Yeah. Yeah, this is like this is the question that you get. Um, people say like, well, cause they want to understandably like figure out how the, the whole hierarchy or structure or landscape where it fits and that kind of thing. And I think that there’s, there’s, uh, I think Phil Black has in his book, he kind of gets into some of the territory stuff.

And then, um, there’ve been, uh, Elliot Montgomery has a. as a really useful map that is useful insofar as it, it also presents, you know, questions. And I’ve talked to him about it. And he said, I just made this map because the students were asking, well, then isn’t everything, you know, kind of right. I show that map to my students too.

Yeah. Uh, and that that opens a really interesting conversation as well. I think the, so, you know, to start out, it’s like, we’re all friends and we’re all associated in this beautiful way. And I think there are a variety of ways in which the territories are, um, are stacked on top of each other and overlap.

And at times you want to kind of separate them for particular kind of intellectual or, you know, theoretical and So I think it’s, it’s a very malleable space, uh, which, which it can be unsettling for people who want more structure, like where’s the edge of my My property, don’t tell me it’s fluid or that it’s, it’s, it’s multidimensional or that it’s, it’s quantum entangled with all these other intellectual pursuits and knowledge systems.

But I think, you know, it is, so, you know, there’s a lot of stuff where it’s like, I remember being in, in, in London and, uh, having, uh, going, you know, having set an appointment to meet with, um, Tony and Fiona, Tony Dunn and Fiona Raby, and I was just like, and I revered them. I mean, there was, there was, it was, it was, I, there’s so much that I’ve learned from and shared with and felt a kind of kinship with them.

You know, one time I’ll never forget this day they were in, they were in Los Angeles and we spent the entire day with each other, you know, started out it was just gonna be like meat for a coffee and cake and then, you know, by the By the end of the day, it’s like, um, I remember Tony saying, like, we were thinking, is anyone hungry?

Let’s, we should get dinner. And being like, well, that one place that we were at for breakfast, like, why don’t we just go back there? And the whole day was just this, this series of overlapping conversations. And that is where the work is happening. You know, if there are any boundaries. Or distinctions that would, that conversation would have been one of the things that you, you kind of point to, to say like, Oh my God, these, it’s just a percolating, it’s a beautiful gumbo of, of, of ideas and interest and passions and desires and ambitions and real concern at a, both at a playful level, but also at a.

You know, slightly antagonistic critical level about how do we, how do we get into, um, how do we elevate the ability of, you know, human creative consciousness to imagine better, more habitable futures. I, you know, I would say generally that’s where, that’s the objective now, then, you know, it gets into the tricky thing of like, well, is your habitable future the same as mine?

And then it gets, um. You know, equally interesting and, and, um, and fun and challenging. And how do we go about doing it? And I think each practice, every individual within practice has their own particular approach that they can adhere to or not, or develop or expand or draw from. I think sometimes it gets a little bit.

Prickly, I think, um, because there’s a, you know, people start feeling like the future is a zero sum game and there better be, my future will be more valuable than someone else’s because look at the, it must be because look at me kind of thing. It’s like, well, I don’t know.

[00:27:16] Jarrett: Well, I mean, I wasn’t, I wasn’t, you know, just to be clear, I was not asking you that to be territorial or to, to, to pit them against each other, but there’s something.

There’s something specific about design fiction, or at least my, my understanding of design fiction, or the way I’ve heard you talk about design fiction that feels, um, and again, this now I sound like I’m being territorial again. I don’t mean it that way. But I think you, you specifically are hitting on something that’s really important, which is this idea of, and I quoted it earlier, tangible and evocative Prototypes from possible near futures.

And you referenced this earlier where it seems like something familiar, but it’s slightly off. There’s something slightly different. It’s very believable. You talk about the magazine as a prototype to pull back. You’ve talked about cereal boxes as something to pull back. And it’s a way to, uh, both see the future, but also to like make sense of something happening today.

And that to me feels very unique to design fiction. This sense of these are all forms that we’re familiar with. These are all things we can understand, but there’s something slightly off. Does that sound right to you at all? Am I, am I sort of reading that, that right?

[00:28:26] Julian: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s precisely right.

And that might be one of the distinguishing characteristics. Uh, you know, again, probably with, with multiple overlaps in other domains, I think that was, that came from. Uh, it was less intellectual, more just like the kinds of things that I enjoy having around that, that make me, and also I realized, you know, after having, you know, doing this for so long that, um, I just, I just kind of realized that, oh, well, I mean, that’s just the way you see that that’s what happens in your brain, imagination when even this week, you know, hanging out with my friend, uh, Andrew and talking about, The kind of futures that we’re working on in this project, my mind will be talking about something and he’ll be talking about like, like 16th century history, intellectual history.

And my mind immediately goes to like, uh, um, uh, like a portable radio, like from the seventies. I was like, Oh, maybe that might be a good way to exhibit that idea. I, I started thinking and then begin to say, what would be the, what would be the, the radio advertisement that you would hear about this particular idea that, that reflects that articulates the, the very, um, articulate historical call.

Element that you’re describing to me as we’re sitting across having coffee. I’m hearing what you’re saying and I’m learning and I start chasing. It’s like how I want. I immediately wonder before I even know what I’m talking about, um, of a radio advertisement that I might hear on on a while driving cross country and I’m tuning in a lot of station.

That’s Over the horizon. It’s like, it’s starting to come in. It’s like, Hey, this is, uh, this is, this is Julian. You just want to introduce you from, we’ve got this new product that’s come out of the market and it goes along with a long line, perfect for your farm. Um, and I started hearing the world that way.

And that’s, I don’t, I think that’s just my kind of, that’s the way my, my brain starts to work for one, for one reason or another into the grounding, the. The, for, for me, it’s a little bit of an abstraction to think about 16th century, but I, I’m, my way of thinking about it for some reason grounds it into the thing that I might, uh, find on a, on a shelf at a grocery store or at a corner bodega.

Or am I here on a radio and I think I realized now, um, especially when, you know, when my friend Andrew and I were talking about it and I, and I started saying that and I see his face light up and I realized like, okay, he does not see that, which is no deficit on his part at all because he sees it in this other way because he’s, you know, he’s, he’s read history in the original German, you know, what kind of thing he sees the world.

Yeah. And I’m like, that’s what I bring into this conversation. Cause I see him light up. He’s like, yeah. Okay. Okay. You go, now you go, you, you tell me the world that you see. And it’s like, I’ve gone there in this very tangible way.

[00:31:32] Jarrett: Yeah. There’s something very pedestrian about it. And I don’t mean that to, to sound, um, uh, you know, uh, pretentious in any way, but it’s, it, it’s common objects.

The, the other thing that I’m thinking about as you were saying that, I think. The first time I heard the term design fiction was probably about 15 years ago or so when it was when, uh, the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York did a exhibition on graphic design and the design studio Metahaven had a project in there called FaceState, which was a collection of artifacts that was imagining a Facebook was, was the government.

you know, or, or, or sort of was operating as a government. So you had credit cards and phones and identification, which is also all of these kind of, uh, artifacts that build this world and perhaps because of the world that I’m in, where I’m, I’m a little bit more on the academic side, a little bit more on the, on the theory side, a lot of my understanding of.

Design fiction, uh, speculative design, critical design, a lot of the, the discourse I see is rooted in Academia, it’s, it’s speculative, it’s stuff that’s happening It’s research driven It’s in museums or galleries It’s not actually out in the world and what strikes me about you is that you’re actually doing this stuff with clients, you’re actually kind of, uh, working on this outside of that academic, uh, sort of, sort of world.

And you’re doing this through your, your organization, your future laboratory. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is and how you work with clients? What, what does this work actually look like when you’re talking to people, uh, in organizations and institutions and, and doing workshops and things like that?

[00:33:19] Julian: It kind of operates in two modes. One mode is. As a, an approach to unlocking creative potential as a, as a kind of, um, a way of. Uh, it might not be on a specific program that is being developed. It might be more like help us imagine into a an A. I. future in the context of, you know, whatever, whatever they might be very specifically focused on.

So like, might be like, what is A. I. and, um, and, and, and television, whatever television is, what, what is that? What is it? Because the stuff that we’re maybe It starts with this basic thing. Uh, that being that there’s this, there’s this new terrain out there and it’s right now people are calling it AI and we have no idea.

We don’t have the language to really. Understand this terrain. It’s as if we have arrived on the shore and there are these, there are these people who, who arrived to meet us as we, as we kind of paddle a short, not trying not to get too colonialist about it, but if we’re, and, and now we don’t have a common language.

We don’t even know, uh, what their, what their systems of power and, uh, value exchange and, uh, belief, you know, and so we, we, we, let’s start with language. What do we even, how do we even express ourselves, you know, in the movies? Like Julian, Julian, I’m Julian. And someone looks around, they’re like, this guy babbling about.

And so in, in that you’re in that mode where I think some people in the commercial world recognize that this is a new terrain we, we, we, we don’t have, we don’t have enough hubris to imagine that we know what’s going to happen. We’re approaching this with the kind of like openness, like. And so that’s, in those contexts, I think they, some people within, you know, commercial organizations recognize that, that if they, that they, they need, uh, people around them who are more adept and more experienced and more open minded or don’t have the, the, you know, so much structure around them that they’re afraid to talk about the unknown, they need them, you know, people like me in the room to be able to help them begin to approach these, um, New unexplored terrain.

So bringing that kind of, um, imagine if it isn’t even saying like a fluency and an ability, a level of comfort with addressing the unknown, uh, and doing it in a way that they can sort of somehow relate to. It’s like, Oh, well, this guy, look at these guys engineering. So he gets our kind of context. So we, you know, it could be a value to have in the room and he’ll also bring this set of.

Yeah. Tools and approach and mindset, you know, they’re called design fiction that might be able to help us and look There’s some look at some of these examples of what he does. It’s not just Analytic work is not going to give us like a PowerPoint deck or that kind of stuff. We’re gonna actually go into this world And we’re going to bring back things that we understand that we can relate to.

And sometimes those things are advertisements that you might appear in a newspaper. Sometimes those things are a, um, uh, a, you know, like a, uh, unboxing video of this speculative product. Like we don’t even know what comes in a box or how do we represent it. Uh, and so you start creating these grounded artifacts that.

That organizations can relate to because it’s, it’s using their language. You know, we’re talking about doing a, you know, if you do a, uh, um, yeah, just, I mean, the simplest thing, like a, like the un the unboxing video or the F faq mm-hmm . That thing, the quick start guide that comes with a thing and you are using that as a, as.

As a canvas to explore these ideas. So you’re kind of like, you’re not working at, you’re not doing world building for the top down. It’s like, you know, the first question, what are we talking about? We’re talking about like five, 10 years in the future. And it’s just like, I have no idea. It might be happening right now, but don’t come, you know, don’t let, we’ll put the structure around it later in terms of not, this is, you know, we’re not, we’re not making predictions here.

We’ve fallen asleep and we woke up in this world and all of a sudden it feels a little bit different. I’m wondering.

[00:37:41] Jarrett: I think that’s I really like the way the way you say that and I can see the value of that for a company or an organization. I have like two questions here. The first one is just very simply.

Are you how? What does this actually look like in practice? Are you leading a workshop and letting the team develop the unboxing video? Are Are they hiring you and then you and your collaborators are making an unboxing video for them to kind of understand this better? What’s, can you just really quickly talk about what that relationship is like first before I ask you this like next bigger question?

[00:38:17] Julian: Yeah, so to a certain degree, it’s all those things, but it’s mostly, um, lately it seemed more like going in and facilitating a workshop. And so the workshop looks like they’re, they’re people in a room. And they, they’re, you know, we sort of, in this case, it was more like a learning development thing. So it wasn’t, they weren’t working on a specific program.

Matter of fact, they were from all over the organization, people flown in from all over the place. And, um, with different kinds of remits, some people were sort of marketing, some people were product, that kind of thing. So in any case, it was more like, um, a. Uh, learning a new tool called design fiction and showing its applicability, not just to engineering kind of stuff, but also, you know, for people who are in marketing or sort of, um, customer service and those kinds of things.

So, in that context, it’s like, I’m going to teach you about this thing I developed. It’s called design fiction. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to have a little bit of a one on one. What is it? And here’s some examples. You pass around material. Not when I pass around this newspaper from an AI future.

So people can say like, they start marveling at the, Oh, okay. Now I see what you’re talking about. You gave me a little bit of theory and I kind of got it a little bit. And you’re talking about science, Star Trek, but now I see what you’re saying. Like, this is something that has come from the future. You know, every level of detail in it, like looking at the classified ads, it’s like, Oh yeah, this is weird.

It’s cool. And then they’re in this mode of like, okay, this is gonna be fun. And then you sort of, you know, we, you give them a brief and a little bit brief is overstating it. You give them like a, essentially working from a workbook. We’re going to look into, we’re going to. Take this particular idiom or domain.

In that case, it was it was a I because everyone’s talking about it. Now we’re going to try to imagine what it looks like for, you know, your particular context. So how do you, um, let’s do the product packaging. For a product that’s come out based on the world that your company operates in new product.

That’s got AI features. Just give me like the key selling points that you might see in a little bullet list if it were a package software. It isn’t a package software anymore, but you know, just let’s just play that. And so then they would, they would sort of, you know, there’d be a sprint. Okay, we’ve got 15 minutes.

Like, let’s see what we get. I’m going around the room. I’m just like, yeah, I’m just sort of That’s amazing. It’s, you know, use that one thing you just said. I think that’s the thing, like invert it, you know, like, you know, so I’m just doing the,

yeah,

[00:40:34] Julian: I’m doing the, look at that. He’s the marching band leader, right.

Um, and then there’s some context where I’ll do a workshop and it’s, it’s, it’s to facilitate the conversation and open up. And so those things happen longitudinal, it might be like, Okay. I’m also commissioned to distill the conversations that happen in that room and represent them as an artifact. So, sometimes you might do a project with a client and they want to something that memorializes the experience and oftentimes that’s a PowerPoint deck or, you know, some summarization.

Now, I might do that, but the emphasis that the emphasis is on the thing that augments the feeling and takes people back to the moment when they were in the workshop, which a PowerPoint deck does not do. Sorry. No matter how many pictures you put or snapshots of all the post it notes, it just, in my experience, it doesn’t.

You know, it doesn’t work. So I’ll memorialize it in an artifact. And my favorite products are product catalogs and newspapers. There are lots of others, but that’s the ones that I relate to so strongly. And so I will produce that. Manufacture it, you know, me sitting in the studio, oftentimes it is just me.

I sort of enjoy just, I know what I want to do. I just want to do it and then I’ll get it. You know, get it manufactured and I’ll make the thing. I’ll send it back. So that was amazing time. You guys, here’s, here’s that experience.

[00:41:56] Jarrett: That’s really helpful, uh, for me and sets up this question that I’m not totally sure how to, how to ask, but I’m interested in this sort of what’s gained and what’s lost when this is practiced in an academic setting versus in a, in a corporate or professional or practice based setting, I think one of the critiques of design fiction of speculative design, critical design in academic settings is that they are.

Closed off from the real world. They’re seen by few people. They’re in a museum setting. They almost become art pieces. So you don’t engage with them as much, which I think the way you’re describing it in your work, you lose a lot of that. Um, or, or, you know, you gain a lot of that you’re actually doing it with people who can build these things, who can actually think about these things, who can apply it to the work that they’re, they’re doing, but I’m also thinking about.

This in relationship to the trajectory of design thinking, for example, where that became sort of a brand on its own, it became this sort of, uh, add on to make, you know, in some cases to make a company feel like they’re doing something innovative. You wrote last year, this essay called, this is design fiction, but this is not about sort of the, uh, corporate takeover of that term.

And in some, some areas, how do you. How do you make sure that or how do you think about making sure that design fiction doesn’t become something that just justifies a company’s own decision making or a way to make them feel like they’re thinking about something, but it’s really just a way to encourage them to do what they’re already doing.

How do you, how do you navigate that when you’re working with, with companies?

[00:43:39] Julian: Um, yeah, it’s a good, it’s a good question. There are two things that come to mind. In that context, one is, um, you know, just doing a little bit of like light policing, I guess, you know, so like that s or, you know, that dispatch or whatever, being one of them, uh, just to kind of remind people where, at least where I think the value is and why it’s important not to, uh, not to

over index something to the point where it’s like, now it’s what now you’re saying it’s basically anything, um, and so I think there’s a little bit of work there, but also like, I’m, um, I’ve had enough experience, I think, just generally with, um, and understand. Intellectual history and the evolution of, you know, kind of human consciousness and I’m not saying that I understand everything about the world, but experienced enough to realize, oh, you know, that ideas are absorbed and reflected through, through not, not in a static way, but, you know, evolutionarily so, so it will change, you know, it’ll evolve and develop.

And at some point, you know, it might be like, um, It might look very different from what I imagined. And I, you know, I don’t want to be the old guy shaking his cane being like, no, you got it all wrong. It’d be like, wow, amazing. Look how you evoked these ideas. Like I never would have guessed. I never would have guessed this is beautiful.

And so, you know, part of me is like, you know, unbalanced. It’s like, I’m just going to keep, I want to keep doing what I’m doing because I enjoy it so much. And it’s a lot of fun and see people seem to get a lot of joy and value out of it. Uh, But I’m not going to, you know, I’m not going to get angry if someone says this is design fiction.

I think the only thing of the only thing that I’ll probably hold on to it’s like, um, design fiction is not prose design is, is translating kind of imagination into material form. So when I say design fiction, I’m saying you’re translating the things that you imagine into a material form. Yes, it’s not prose based fiction.

And that’s, that’s going to always going to be hard because first thing people think of when they think of fiction is not. An object that is, you know, is, is itself a piece of fiction, like a prop in a film, for example. They’re going to be starting thinking about things on a shelf that have lots and lots of these pieces of paper with, with lots and lots of words on them.

That’s always going to be a problem. But I think that’s part of the challenge is thinking like there are other forms of storytelling, right? And they’re just, they’re just canonical accepted, you know, dominant, I guess is the word to use forms. One is that it’s called a movie when it’s called a show. One is called, uh, um, you know, a novel, you know, et cetera.

And they’re all, but there’s such a continuum in between all those. Extending into the world of the prototype from the commercial world, the, the hardware type of an object or the maquette in like an architecture, like there are all these ways in which people sort of imagine that the future, the spreadsheet, the financial projection, that’s a fiction, believe it or not, it’s not true.

[00:46:49] Jarrett: But I really appreciate about your work is that you really are approaching design as a type of material culture. It is a tangible thing. It is a thing that you hold. It is not you know that what you’re doing is not pros like you just said. And I always define like to define design as ideology made artifact or an idea that is made concrete.

In some way, a point of view that then is, is given a shape. And I want to go back to something you said earlier about when you’re talking about the futures, asking whose future, who’s a part of that future, what, you know, that there are these, these multiple futures. And I’m wondering if you can connect that idea of the materiality of design fiction and the ideologies about whose futures we might inhabit and how do you.

Talk with your clients when talk with organizations about how these artifacts sort of embody ideas, embody ideologies, embody different trajectories. Are you able, I’m sorry, this question is getting bigger and bigger, the more I talk about, like, are you able to sort of talk, how do you sort of talk about the actual physicality of.

What you all are making as a way to kind of show these are specific ideas, you know what I mean? Like, how do you how do you sort of go from the thing to big idea about the world? Well, I’ll tell you what

[00:48:15] Julian: I what starts coming to mind when you as you were kind of framing it the Think one one of the one of the beautiful things about this practice design fiction as a practice And something that I’ve learned along the way, I think, to a large degree from, um, from Dun Raby, I think, I feel like, as you were talking, it’s like a lot of their work kind of came to mind, uh, was, and then stuff that I’ve learned from another remarkable creative kind of in this space, um, Alex McDowell, who, it would be, it would be, uh, I’d be diminishing his significance if I said he was just a production designer because he is not, but he’s done production design on some, some of my favorite films, Minority Report being, and Blade Runner being two of the biggies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, is you can tell, you can, you can provide a point of entry to Possible Future. Indirectly. So a lot of, oftentimes, I did for a long time. I didn’t want to use the, the, uh, the idiom world design or world world building. It felt like a little bit too top down and God liked me.

Right.

[00:49:33] Julian: Right. Enough of my, um, kind of academic work was like, don’t be, don’t be, don’t be God. Like be humble. I don’t know, something like that. And so I, I resisted that and, and I, and I still do, except to say that it’s sort of the invert to me, inversion is to say, um, create a point of entry into a world that, that, that compels the person experiencing it.

Like, so if they, if you give someone a newspaper from the future, that they’re, they bring their imagination into that, I’m not telling you the story. I’m not telling you the whole thing. I’m not, there’s no firm and fast conclusion. I know you might want that. You might, you might think that you want that.

What you want though, is the, the magical superpower of this approach is that you are part of the imagining and you might think that you just want to hire someone to tell you what the future should be. Probably it’s more effective and helpful. Possibly to have someone say, um, I’m not going to give you what you want.

I’m going to give you what you need. And what you need is, is a, a place to, for you to bring your own, maybe slightly hampered, or, um, uh, it needs a little bit of exercise. It hasn’t gotten a lot of, a lot of workouts at the Jamie. I haven’t, you know, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit paunchy, um, your imagination.

is, is, has been diminished a bit. No fault of your own. You just need to, you just need to do a little bit of a workout. And part of that workout is, uh, I’m going to show you something that’s going to force you to wonder. And the first thing that’s going to happen is going to, is you’re going to be like, I don’t get it.

What’s going on here. Good question. Good question. Well, you know, let, let’s start. Let’s look at the contours of this thing and doing it in such a way to do. It’s not a true or false or like a, b, there are only four right answers and you got to pick or one right answer. You got to pick one of them. A, B, C or D.

Come on. It’s more like, let’s have a conversation. So if you can provide that little bit of a, of a kind of portal into that world to people like, what’s going on here? Okay. Great. Okay. You asked the right question. What is going on? Let’s talk about it. And I think that’s the, that’s the, that’s what came to mind when you were, when you started describing.

And I think a lot of the things that I saw in the early Dun and Raby work were that for me,

um,

[00:52:10] Julian: you know, cause they were making objects and I’d look at it and be like, You know, what is that? They’re not there to answer the question, but you’re, you’re kind of wondering, like, you see, and you feel something.

So you’re just trying to give someone, you’re trying to tap into and activate aspects of their imagination through this object that, you know, at the time can’t do any of the stuff that that’s going on. Maybe there was early voice stuff back in the day, but certainly if you do a voice that speaks like this, it is not human.

So they’re just, there’s just these little. The Guffany kind of tricks that you can do. Can you do the same thing with a sense of purpose? I’m not going to tell you a visual story about, uh, you know, a 112 minute film. Because as, as a piece of entertainment, I want to do this because I’ve got other objectives around, you know, kind of commercial development, or I’ve got other objectives around sort of more in the work in the realm of Tony and Fiona’s work.

I want to open up a public dialogue. So I’m going to create this work that will, you know, because of, because of my stature and status within the art world, um, it can be exhibited. And that, you know, thousands, thousands of people will see it and there’ll be conversations about it. There’ll be the review in the New York times, all that kind of stuff.

It’s like, how do we open up and enter into these possible future worlds? Film, I think is probably the most dominant one, probably video games, right? Alongside it, if not more, uh, science fiction shows, science fiction novels. What else, what else can we do? I’m an engineer, damn it. And I want to play in that space.

I don’t want to just do traditional. You know, trad, engineering, commercial work company, I would, I mean, I would, especially if it were, if you did have a context in which you were operating in this kind of, let’s just think things from the future in order to help us figure out interesting things to build.

That keep us innovative and kind of forward thinking.

[00:54:08] Jarrett: You talk a lot about the feeling of being an eight year old making things. You began this conversation talking about, you know, you and your brother making films when you were kids. And you, that is something that I feel, I feel like that drives a lot of my work and the things that, that I make and.

I’m really interested in, this is a very selfish question. I work with design students, 18, 19, 20 years old. They’re going to be, they want to be graphic designers and in, on one side, they have more tools for imagination. That ever before, you know, anything that they can imagine they can make. And then on the other side, there’s so much structure around what they think is allowed or what is acceptable or what is good design or the, the economic structure of, Hey, I’m spending all this money to be here for years.

I need to get a job. So I can’t do anything that’s too outside of, you know, what will look good in my portfolio. You talk a lot about, you know, we need to teach imagination again. And so just very selfishly, how do you think about teaching imagination? How do we set up the next generation of designers to imagine again, to, you know, kind of break out of the status quo to get between all of these lanes, to, to do the weird stuff, to go more into the future.

How do you think about that? How can we. How can we sort of encourage that in, in this next generation?

[00:55:49] Julian: Yeah, it’s, that’s a, that’s a big topic. It’s actually really present at the moment because, um, just, just at the outset of a project with, uh, with the. With a, with a guy who I followed for a long time, but we only recently kind of really connected.

We should have connected probably ages ago, but like mutual society, uh, Carl DeSalvo, who is, Oh yeah, he was on the show. Oh, was he? Okay. I got to find that episode. Yeah. Yeah. He’s great. Yeah. So, so Carl is doing, um, a kind of year at the Keller center at Princeton Keller center for entrepreneurship, maybe something like that.

And, um, you know, he reached out and he’s like, Hey, can you come? Come by and do a bit. And I was like, I’m at a point now where it’s like, yeah, I can, but you know, really like, let’s not waste each other’s time. Let’s, let’s figure out, let’s do something substantial. Like I’ll come in, I’ll do the, you know, I’ll do the electric for your kids.

That’s not, that’s not a big deal, but if I’m going to come out there and you and I are who we are, let’s, let’s really try to build something. Like let’s, let’s associate with each other meaningfully and richly and deeply, not just, uh, Yeah, laptop and give me your usual,

[00:57:04] Jarrett: right. Your stock lecture

[00:57:06] Julian: that you do.

Yeah, exactly. That’s, you know, I, and I really, I literally feel like I don’t have time for that. Um, And I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, I mean that, but I got time for bigger, better things that we could do. And so, I’ll do the bit, but the, we spent probably a couple months, uh, having, you know, a call every other week.

What is that thing? What is that thing? What is that thing? And we kind of beautifully, just in the moment of like, whoa, that’s it, settled on this idea. We’ll see where it goes, I mean, I think it’s, I think we gotta do it, is imagining the future of I guess, you know, let’s just call it for the moment design education.

Uh, I think that’s sort of related to, I think they’re wondering at Keller, you know, Princeton, like what would be a design degree here? What would that look like? I mean, Princeton is like undergrad for the most part. I mean, it’s like, you know. I don’t know. It’s, it’s got a, it’s got a particular character and flavor, but what would that be?

And so I love that because I think it starts getting at this question. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that, that part of it is you have to step away from the institutional structure to a certain degree and maybe over, over, you know, go way beyond it. So how are we going to, how are we going to go about this is the design fiction way.

So like, let’s create the ephemera. That would live around this institution. So what’s the trifold? Sure, that You know, you would get as a, as a, as a potential student arriving on campus with maybe your, your, your skeptical dad and you’re wondering mom, kind of like, Hmm, look at this. Oh, I like this Gothic architecture.

This is beautiful campus. Wouldn’t you love to be here? Kind of thing. You pick up the brochure and you kind of look through it. And what does it say about this education that you’re about to embark upon? And we’re being really expansive about it. It’s like, is it a place? In other words, are you, are you ensconced within the, the wonderful, you know, uh, fenced in, you know, property of, of a university?

Is it, is it, what is the evolution of a studio based learning context? Um, are you sitting is, is, you know, all of a sudden it’s like, is the horseshoe kind of lecture hall, does that even exist in this context or are you actually, you know, doing things that I think, you know, like architectural programs will do, it’s like, we’re going to do, uh, you know, three weeks in Rome.

Right. I’ve, you know, I’ve got friends who do, who teach in architecture and that, and then, you know, and

yeah,

[00:59:38] Julian: they, they, he asked me year after year, it’s like, can you come with us? Can you come with us? And. And I, so I learn about what they do. And it’s like, one of the things that they did is one, uh, Lawrence, um, technological university, my friend, Carl is the Dean there.

And he’s like, I had them rather than writing in a notebook where the exercise was, uh, whatever the brief was rendering architectural spaces, but only using mid journey. So your notebook. Our renderings coming out. And I, you know, I don’t know where that goes to. I don’t, you know, people can say like, well, that’s, I don’t get it.

How’s that going to make them, you know, if they go work for Noren Foster, how’s that going to make them any more valuable because they, they don’t know how to draw or whatever. I don’t know architecture, but it’s different. It’s certainly different. And it’s certainly bold in, in the context that he’s adopting these kinds of emerging tools that people still don’t know what they’re good for to, you know, to certain certain contexts.

Um, yeah. They seem eminently valuable in the, in the context of imagining, you know, uh, spaces that people occupy buildings. Cause you know, they, you can, you can mess around with that. And then what happens when the brain is, is using these tools, not even the brain, but just like the, your understanding of what it is to be an architect in that context.

So, you know, my. My more direct response to what you’re asking is, um, is to find the, the, the, the boundaries where structure is pushing back or enforcing things and saying, I’m going to break this

in

[01:01:04] Julian: a meaningful way. I’m not going to do it because I’m a petulant or because I’m upset at the, at the. At the institution or the structure or the dean doesn’t know what they’re talking about or whatever.

It’s more like what what’s just beyond like imagining into it and feeling yourself as an educator as the person who students are looking towards. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to try. I’m going to, I’m going to wonder what it’s like to, uh In one of my favorite examples, like Dick Fosbury is like, I’m going to jump over this high bar backwards.

I can imagine people are like, dude, don’t do it. What are you talking about? It doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m going to just see what it feels like. I know I couldn’t explain, you know, he probably could. I mean, that’s probably kinematically that probably makes a lot more sense. It seems, but it’s doing the thing that hygienically people are like, really?

Yeah,

[01:01:55] Julian: you’re going to get in trouble, like, well, maybe it could kind of trouble.

[01:02:00] Jarrett: I love that. That’s such a nice way to actually wrap up this conversation. I like this idea. Just let’s get in trouble. Let’s uh, let’s just do it. Let’s just, let’s, let’s, let’s try it. Uh, Julian, I’m such a fan of your work. I really liked the way that you think about these things.

I found this conversation to be so, so fun and so fascinating. Thanks for being on the program.

[01:02:18] Julian: My pleasure. Very generous of you to invite me in. I enjoyed the conversation.

[01:02:24] Jarrett: That was my conversation with Julian Bleecker. It was recorded on March 10th, 2025. Our theme music is by Jeremiah Chu. The show is funded thanks to the generosity of listeners like you. If you like what we’re doing, I and get some bonus content each month. You can follow us across social media, at Surface Podcast, and you can listen to all of our previous episodes.

Thanks for listening. Wherever you get your podcasts and at our website, scratching the surface dot FM. Thanks for

listening.