[00:00:00] Host: We are here to talk about design fiction with the folks from the near future laboratory. Very exciting. And what we’re going to be doing today is I’m going to give a quick, very quick round up of what’s happening at IFTF, um, in case you are the first time you’re joining one of our, um, Foresight Talks webinars, then we’re really going to dive into a long and juicy conversation with the near future laboratory.

[00:00:39] And we will leave 20 minutes at the end for audience Q and A. So please do keep your questions coming throughout the, uh, webinar and we’ll be collecting them and we’ll be able to hear from our guests. If you don’t know the Institute for the future is a nonprofit organization. We were founded in 1968. Um, we, uh, we do research about the future.

[00:01:03] We have teachings and trainings about the future. Um, The whole purpose of doing the work and the reason why we exist as an organization is to help people do new things in the present. Um, this is a snapshot from a fashion show that we had probably four or five years ago about, um, climate change. Climate ready fashions for the year 2030 so we’re also doing a lot of our own design fiction at the Institute.

[00:01:31] We have a lot of different kinds of trainings I’m not going to go into these in detail but just wanted to let you know we have courses for individuals we have courses on Coursera. in multiple languages. We have our courses for teams. If you’re interested specifically in design futures, we have one coming up in May.

[00:01:51] We have our really fun fast futures class, which is just 90 minutes on June 14th. So you can find out all that kind of information online there. And if you’re coming here, you’re probably interested in learning more about futures thinking. We have all these different kinds of things that we offer at the Institute.

[00:02:10] The next foresight talks webinar, in fact, is going to be a really interesting one on decolonizing, uh, techno orientalism and why foresight needs a feedback loop with our wonderful colleague, Jeff Yang, who’s Um, talking to, um, a cultural critic and journalist, Don Chan. We also have the Futures Buddy Matches.

[00:02:33] If you haven’t done that, we will match you up with someone who is maybe in the same field as you, maybe in the same time zone as you. It’s up to you. We’ll connect you with someone. We have a great newsletter, uh, just a lot going on at the Institute. And the last thing I want to say is If it is, if you’re used to spending more time on other platforms, just make sure when you send something into the chat that you’ve selected everyone, and please do put your questions in the q amp a or the chat will be will be monitoring both places.

[00:03:08] And with that. I’m really excited today to introduce our host, um, our wonderful colleague, Jorge Camacho. He’s a strategic designer, foresight strategist, and lecturer. Um, he works as a research affiliate, a longtime research partner for the Institute for the Future. And he’s a co founder of Diagonal, which is a research design and future studio based in Mexico City, where he is.

[00:03:33] He also teaches systems thinking and futures thinking at Diagonal. At Centro and Ibero in Mexico City. Um, he has a PhD in cultural studies for the University of East London, and he’s really interested. His work focuses at the intersections of design futures, systemic design, and transition design. And Jorge, I’ll do one more slide for you to introduce our guests.

[00:03:59] Um, and then you just let me know whenever you want me to stop sharing the slide.

[00:04:04] Jorge Camacho: Thank you so much, Lynn, for the, for the introduction and in general for inviting me to host and to facilitate this, uh, this conversation. Uh, of course, with, um, with a couple of, uh, colleagues that I admire quite a lot, uh, professionally and personally.

[00:04:21] Um, and I’m so excited to be able to, you know, guide this conversation and, and, and, and explore with them this fascinating field, uh, that, that they call design fiction. So I’m going to, uh, introduce them briefly before we start the conversation. So, um, we have. Julian Bleeker. Julian is a startup founder, a future strategist, a professor at UCS, famed School of Cinematic Arts, a mentor and author.

[00:04:53] He was formed as an engineer with multiple degrees, so he knows how to execute on ideas. But I really like how he’s, you know, evolved professionally and how he defines himself now as a creative leader with a range with the range of a generalist. So as he argues, he’s at his best when he’s working with organizations translating the now into the next.

[00:05:17] And his greatest superpower is that he’s able to look at the world a bit sideways and see opportunities to create products and experiences. that are unanticipated, unexpected, and beautiful alternatives to the statute school, which is of course a lot about what we will be talking about today. And we also have, uh, have with us here the great Fabien Girardin.

[00:05:37] He’s a researcher, engineer, uh, executive active in the development of digital and humane Technologies. Uh, the M. I. T. He pioneered in techniques that analyze digital traces of human activity for urban innovation and then apply them in the industry with a travel detection system produced for Boeing. Um, most notably, uh, he was the co CEO of, uh, BBVA Data and Analytics, a center of excellence in advanced analytics that derived knowledge from financial data to transform the banking industry.

[00:06:13] Uh, but Very much in the same way that Julian has a broad spectrum. Fabian has a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary skills. He guides organizations in transforming data and experiments into innovative cultures. So thank you so much, Julian and Fabian for accepting our invitation to have this conversation.

[00:06:32] It’s great to have you here. Um, basically the idea. is I’m going to be leading a conversation for around 20 minutes. And then as Lynn explained, we’re going to be having 20 minutes for the conversation with the audience. But before we move that move on to that, Julian, Fabian, do you want to say hi to the audience and introduce yourselves quickly?

[00:06:54] Fabien Girardin Sure. Fabian. Uh, or I was going to say Julian.

[00:06:59] Julian Bleecker: Go ahead.

[00:07:01] Fabien Girardin No, yeah. Hello, everybody. Uh, and really thanks for the invitation. Uh, I think it’s going to be, we have, we’re going to have a fun, I think, fun conversations around the practice of present fiction. And, and I think you presented me, um, in, in a great, great way.

[00:07:18] Uh, it’s hard these days to really describe who I, what I do really, it becomes a, almost a joke when people ask me like, what do you do? And because, uh, because I have an engineering background and I’m so Developing the practice of design fiction, and I do data science. So, but event, eventually I like to make things.

[00:07:38] I still like to have my hands dirty, uh, coding and creating things, uh, while in the same time, so to, um, participating to, uh, to, uh, design futures in general. Thank you, Julian.

[00:07:55] Julian Bleecker: Yeah, thank you for that for that introduction. It borders on like slightly embarrassing. But I appreciate that and just echoing Fabian’s remarks that, yeah, it’s, it’s, I think these things become extensive and kind of almost feel like they’re a little bit rambling because of the diversity of our interests and our experience.

[00:08:18] And I think that’s probably something that’s shared with very many people who kind of operate and want to operate in the space of design futures or futures design or design fiction. Um, it requires a very kind of generalist sensibility with lots of expertise and lots of different shapes of personality and that kind of thing.

[00:08:35] So I’m really excited for this conversation.

[00:08:38] Jorge Camacho: Great. Thanks. I really, I mean, appreciate, uh, how you, uh, have, uh, started to, uh, you kind of re evaluate and highlight the importance of having a generalist, uh, background, a generalist, uh, perspective. Uh, but, uh, at least in my experience, uh, perhaps you sort of like become a generalist.

[00:08:59] So I, I was wondering if we could start, and also being a fan of origin stories and being a, long time fan of the work that you do, uh, at the near future laboratory. And considering that you are both invited here as co founders, uh, of the near future laboratory, if we could, uh, start the conversation by looking back at, uh, at how, uh, the near future laboratory was born.

[00:09:23] Maybe you can tell us a little bit, each of you, uh, what you were doing just before, uh, you started the near future laboratory. And through that, how, how did it come about? How did you decide to form this, uh, this, uh, this studio, this excellent studio?

[00:09:39] Julian Bleecker: It’s a good story. This is gonna be good. Um, so the, uh, I’ve been telling this story a bunch of people, uh, um, over the last year or so, uh, particularly as, as, as I recognize that with the, with the book project that we’re working on.

[00:09:53] So we just finished a book and now we’re going through the, uh, called the manual design fiction. And that started out as essentially, I really wanted to do, um, a retrospective on what we had done. Together as a, as a kind of shared a group, um, over maybe it had been like about at the time when we started talking about maybe like 12 or 13 years that we had been working together and it felt like the time to do that kind of thing.

[00:10:17] And in that retrospective, um, as I’ve been looking back, as we’ve now been completing the book, uh, which took a slightly different form. I started thinking about the evolution of the near future laboratory. And so to tell that story, it seems to say like, well, it first started out very humbly as a blog.

[00:10:33] And, um, I think it was around a time when I was doing some projects alongside of the Institute for the future. Where I started out, uh, what about the, the far futures concepts that I think a lot of the Institute for the future, the work that was going on then, um, reminded me of, and I was very much interested as a, as someone who builds things as an engineer, I was very much interested in futures that look like maybe something that I could do next week or next month.

[00:10:59] And so I started playing around with this idea of the near future laboratory of the near future. And then this URL was available near future laboratory, which kind of embodied all these sensibilities operating in your future laboratory as a place where things are explored and discovered and actually made you kind of prototype that.

[00:11:15] And I just registered that for my blog. So it started as a blog and very interestingly, people sort of thought like, Hey, well, can I come visit your lab? I would love to stop by. And that really was the most extensive. The studio behind my, my house, where I would do these kinds of projects and experiments.

[00:11:31] So it really started at that point. And I kind of leaned into almost as a design fiction itself, the fact that it was a lot of the photography that I would do representing it would be myself. Or sometimes I’d put my wife in a jumpsuit, uh, that had near future laboratory on it as if this were a place where action was things, you know, lab stuff was happening.

[00:11:51] And then over time. I think it was Nicholas Nova first reached out to me for based on a project I did, and he wanted to reblog it. And I’d never heard this term reblog. So I said, you know, let’s get on a call and talk about it. What is this thing? And so we kind of became, became fast friends and started collaborating together.

[00:12:07] And Nicholas and Fabian had been working together on things anyway, which I think is where Fabian came in, if you want to carry it, carry it from there.

[00:12:16] Fabien Girardin Yeah, sure. We were doing actually our research, our PhD in the domain of, uh, human computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. And, uh, Julian, we’re researching in the domain of locative media.

[00:12:28] I don’t know if it still reminds you of early works, but, um, and I think, um, and I was working with, with Nicholas doing both of us, our, our PhDs. And, uh, and I think we, we, all of us. Through blogs, we’re, we’re kind of getting frustrated with the lack of space for in our research communities to, to discuss the future implications of the kind of technologies that we’re creating.

[00:12:55] So we were there to kind of make sense of technology that we’re building, but we felt like there was no, there was a lot of space to discuss about, um, applications of the technologies, but not really the implications. And I think that, uh, it makes sense for us to have, uh, children kind of started this kind of little.

[00:13:14] Fictional structure and for me kind of made sense to kind of join Nicholas and Julian in a way to have a space without the constraints of the discipline I was in, without the constraints of academia, um, in order to kind of have a more modern way to produce knowledge around, around the future. And that’s, um, I think that’s how we kind of all, uh, got together.

[00:13:40] And as we, as we got together, we, we, we accumulated projects together kind of out. While we’re doing our research. But with this kind of space, uh, next to our, uh, our own laboratories,

[00:13:55] Julian Bleecker: I think one of the interesting things about that, that evolution is that it was, it was very organic. Um, I, from the outset, I, I, I told myself, uh, that I never wanted the new future laboratory to be, uh, Like a, like a C corp.

[00:14:10] Like I never wanted to have that, that level of responsibility to where this is where I, I have to get clients in order to do work or, you know, these, these kinds of things where I felt they would put demands and it would shape the work in a way that I didn’t want it to be shaped. And I always thought of it like a playground, um, and a, a place where you just sort of, um.

[00:14:30] A lot of unstructured play, as they say, for, you know, the developing imagination of children. And I always, I wanted to embrace that, that notion. And, and so it always meant that a couple of things that, that we, we, we were all also Doing other things that often informed and shape what we were becoming what we’re doing.

[00:14:53] We, we, we had a certain amount of flexibility and playfulness to the, to the, to the structure to the relationships that we had amongst each other. So there was never really that kind of tension that can come where all of a sudden, to a significant degree like you know money is involved. To be blunt. It’s like, it’s just, we could just do projects.

[00:15:14] We could do self initiated things because we had some free time and. Along, along that trajectory is around when, um, so I, I was, I was also working at an advanced design team at Nokia and, uh, and, and happened to every once in again, passed by a guy named Nick Foster. When I would go to the London studio and occasionally he would come to, to, uh, to California, I think probably in California as often as he possibly could, as he could.

[00:15:41] Make an excuse to have the company pay for it. And I remember just one time I might be remembering this wrong, but I sincerely remember him kind of coming over around to my desk and in a very self effacing, very British way. So to said, I kind of, you know, I like this near future laboratory thing that you’re doing.

[00:15:59] Can I join?

[00:16:04] A beautiful moment, the way I remember it. I want to hold on to that memory that was, was, you know, someone who I admired for his creativity and just for his good humor and just a good guy to hang out with when, when we were in each other’s respective cities and he kind of, he kind of joined in this very organic way.

[00:16:20] And the same thing happened with Israel. Who’s part of our little core team, and then eventually Rohit. And I always wanted to have that possibility for openness. I wanted it to be a playground where other people could come along and join. And that was like kind of this, what I see as a kind of like third evolutionary steps.

[00:16:38] So the first one being it’s a blog, the next one being like, Um, you know, a few people joined Nicholas and Fabian and then, and then Nick and Israel and Rohit. We start doing projects together and just joining and basically meeting every Tuesday morning in a, in a call on Slack, um, and just having what’s, what’s going on.

[00:16:56] And sometimes we talk about nothing but donuts. Sometimes we’re actually talking about projects that are happening or new ideas. And then this next evolution, which is, which happened during the pandemic, when I started kind of doing these projects. More public office hours. And it was just a time because it’s like everyone’s going out of their mind.

[00:17:11] I’m going out of my mind staring in my studio alone. What are ways in which we can open up this, this, this, this entity, which had a bit of a very humble following people sort of like the near future laboratory curious place. What are these guys? And so I did in. And then we opened that up into this discord community.

[00:17:30] which has become this almost like, I see it as like the third evolution of the near future laboratory, where it’s more of a, of a, of a vibe. It’s more of a sensibility and approach to thinking about possibilities and thinking about approaches to thinking about possibilities of the near future. What do, what worlds do we want?

[00:17:49] And then not just discussing them, but actually building things, which is a very much a part of it.

[00:17:54] Jorge Camacho: That’s great. I really love, First of all, the idea of the near future laboratory being like the first fiction of the near future laboratory was the near future laboratory itself. And then that becoming a reality and and we’ll come back later in the conversation to talk about this third stage in the evolution of the near future laboratory towards this kind of larger community that you’re gathering around this court.

[00:18:20] And, uh, and the way in which it sounds like you’ve been able to grow and to take it to the next level without necessarily going through, uh, you know, the formalization or the, you know, the highly structural, uh, structural way to develop an organization. Um, but before we do that, I, I mean, and also considering that.

[00:18:38] I’m sure there’s a lot of, uh, people that are big fans and followers of the near future laboratory work in the audience, but there may be some others that are joining and maybe they are curious about what is this design fiction, how is it used to explore the near future? And, and one of, one of the, um, at least one of the first few references that I have, uh, of the work of the near Future laboratory is, uh, uh, an essay.

[00:19:02] Julian, that you wrote around 2009, if I’m correct, where you proposed the, the idea of design fiction. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what was included in that essay, why you wrote it, what was your intention and how that, uh, was connected with this early history of the new feature laboratory.

[00:19:27] Julian Bleecker: Yeah, sure. So I wrote an essay that was, um, that had the ironic title, a short essay on design science, fact and fiction. Um, it wasn’t short, uh, but I wanted to, uh, so, so the way the whole thing sort of started with, um, when I was teaching at, uh, USC when I was there, so I was there from 2000. Forward to 2008.

[00:19:51] And I had the great pleasure of kind of collaborating and working alongside of other faculty members from other kind of like, I guess, area universities, both in Los Angeles, but then also generally in Southern California. And at one point, I, there was a, there was a faculty discussion group reading group like because you call it.

[00:20:10] That was where we would just sort of engage with each other’s material all sort of early days before it’s going to be submitted formally and these kinds of things. And, um, I, I read an essay, um, by, uh, by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell. The name just went out of my head. Um, but they were the, the, the, the crux of it was that they were reflecting on how the ubiquitous computing professionals are there.

[00:20:37] Their imaginary has been shaped by their experiences when they were young children. So the kind of science fiction that they grew up with, uh, shaped what they came to understand, uh, as ubiquitous computing. And that was like a. Really big area of focus, particularly for Paul and Genevieve. Genevieve was at Intel and Paul is at UC Irvine.

[00:20:57] And I found that fascinating and I, and I kind of reflected on it. And then subsequent to that, we were, I was asked to respond to an essay that, uh, or a little short pamphlet that Bruce Sterling, the science fiction writer had done. And at the time he was a Futurist in Residence, I think it was called, at Art Center College of Design.

[00:21:16] So we actually got to hang out, which was like amazing. You know, I’d been a big fan of his work, so I was a little bit starstruck, and I had to respond to this thing. And in and around that, we just kind of struck up this kind of longitudinal conversation about my fascination with him deciding that he wanted to learn about design.

[00:21:35] And, and, and I was just kind of, I just, I sort of, I was in wonder that you could do that. Like, it just, Oh, wait, you’re a science fiction writer. Now you’re learning about design. And of course you can. So there’s a little bit of a revelation around that. And then my own relationship to design was kind of, um, burgeoning as I, as I started, was working at, at Nokia and in and through that, I was kind of coupling these two, two ideas, learning about design and how science fiction can shape the imaginary In a active way.

[00:22:03] So it’s not just something that you ponder and think of, but actually it becomes something that infuses itself and kind of effervesces in the work that you do as an engineer, as a computer science professional, as a, as an academic, uh, academic, it, it, it, it, it just gets into your bones so that this is the way you’re expressing the, the, the, the things that you want to create in the world.

[00:22:26] And I was just like, how does that work? And so essentially that, that was what that essay was about, how those things design science, fact and fiction, you know, engineering, all these things can kind of intermingle. Um, and then once I, once I kind of understood that or had a grip on that and it seemed like, um, quite evident, like, of course, I mean, I could even look at my own life.

[00:22:48] Like I grew up on Star Trek and it’s like, that is clearly what informed, My decisions to become an engineer. I wanted to build stuff like that, whether it was a rocket ship or a communicator or a tricorder, whatever. Like I want to make things with buttons and dials that help people go on, you know, beautiful missions.

[00:23:08] That was like my Montessori school mind was operating that way. And so I wanted to understand, could you invert that? Could you use. Essentially, the, the future fictional imaginary, could you figure out the ways in which that operates on someone’s imagination in order to be more deliberate about it. So like, let’s create these, these, these visually acute kind of embodiments of the worlds that we want.

[00:23:39] And use that as a way to kind of direct our, our focus, our attention, our concentration, our imagination into actually building those things. So, so, so that, that was essentially the crux of it. How can we almost, uh, the, the, the simplest kind of analogy that I think is quite effective is can we behave like time traveling anthropologists or archeologists going into the future?

[00:24:07] Grabbing some things from the future that we, we imagined and bringing them back as actual artifacts. And those artifacts become design fiction. They become these kind of almost like totems that they’re symptoms of a possible world and constructing, constructing the imaginary around those things around those, around those elements.

[00:24:27] And if you think about like our, maybe for let’s roughly like our generation, I know it’s super broad because it’s a wide audience, but we, we grew up on a particular vision. Many of us grew up on a particular vision of what the future looks like. And a lot of that is based on cyberpunk. So, so a genre that, that, uh, you know, William Gibson, Neil Stevenson, Bruce Sterling certainly, uh, are, might assign themselves as associated with, and it’s a particular vision of the future.

[00:24:57] And that is so deeply infected and sort of shaped our imagination of what the future could be about possibility. That that’s what we start looking for. That’s what we start creating. I mean, we had one of the world’s largest companies change its name to essentially an idiom from a science fiction book.

[00:25:17] So what can we do? Otherwise, if there are other kinds of futures that we want, Can we use our imagination to imagine those and then begin to construct essentially what the, what the, what the, what the science fiction authors have done, but instead of doing it in prose, doing it in actual artifacts and little stand ins for the things that we want in those, in those near future worlds.

[00:25:43] Jorge Camacho: That sounds amazing. And, and, and again, I come, keep coming back to this idea of the circularity almost that that can exist when you, uh, imagine design fictions and then those fictions have a power to affect the present and reality and therefore change change course. I see a lot of questions that are, uh, popping up in the, in the chat that I was wondering.

[00:26:04] I think we can start to explore some of these things if we start to, uh, show people. and talk a little bit about specific, um, specific projects. And, and of course, the audience can go and check out, uh, you know, near future laboratories website. And I think you have there a lot of, uh, you know, your, uh, previous work.

[00:26:23] Uh, but, uh, I wanted to, to explore some of some perhaps more recent work and, and something that I find interesting, uh, is for example, the way in which, uh, You have been able to collaborate with organizations so that they can start to use, uh, you know, the practice of design fiction, uh, for thinking about the future for innovation, uh, for, uh, transformation, et cetera.

[00:26:47] And one of the, one of the ways in which we can go about it, it’s, it’s by looking at the work that Fabian has done, uh, BVVA. ‘cause, uh, I, I think, uh, if I’m correct, Fabian, you were able, I mean, apart from the work you did around data science in these large fi uh, financial organizations, you, uh, you were, uh, interested also in exploring and you explored a little bit about, uh, how to use design fiction, um, in this organization.

[00:27:13] So, Fabian, do you want to share a little bit about it?

[00:27:16] Fabien Girardin Um. Yes, sure. So, um, you mentioned BVA. It’s a multinational financial institution with with 120, 000 employees, and they were a client of the new virtual laboratory. So I had been working with them iteratively, like every every three months as collaboration with them.

[00:27:38] We would produce prototype that shed lights on the potential uses of data. And that was, that was kind of 10 years ago when, when people were talking about starting to talk about big data or even, even, even earlier. And what, what we would do is just produce this prototype that would take the shape of visualizations.

[00:28:01] Um, Applications, little prototypes, um, little, little algorithms and also design fictions, um, and, and that stage, we’re not really sure that was kind of fiction. We’re not presenting anything as design fiction, which is kind of presenting a mix of prototypes. And, and at some point, uh, they invited me to join them as part of their, of their group, and as Julian mentioned, it’s when you’re new, new future out there, you always kind of.

[00:28:29] You jump into one opportunity to another. And that’s kind of the beauty of the structure that we have. So I decided to kind of have the experience of the 120, 000 employee organization, uh, because I felt like this is something that, uh, is worth, worth living and experiences. So, and I joined as the. It’s the co CEO.

[00:28:50] Uh, so my role was to kind of continue envisioning and experiment experimenting with, uh, kind of potential uses of data. So I was leading a team of 50 data scientists. Um, and, and we use, uh, design fiction as firstly, like as a better way to communicate the potential of our complex system. So when I got entered into the team, we had all kind of a way to present our machine learning capabilities and, and we were, we would produce demos and, and eventually that was so complex that people had a hard time understanding what does it mean for them.

[00:29:30] Like a, at the C level, for instance, what does it mean for, for me, what does it mean for my business unit or my department? So that’s when, uh, I started to use, uh, fictions, uh, as a way kind of to communicate things in a more direct way. And I use the language of BBVA. So use the kind of the design language and, and also the words that were spoken and, and kind of the brief for the team was always to like project that into.

[00:29:59] A few iterations futures in the future. So we, we would kind of hack the design language of BBVA that looked a bit futuristic, but not too much. So it felt, it felt really like the near future. Um, so that was kind of a way to, to, to express and better communicate and to have from, for the team of 50 data scientists, we had a voice within a large organization of 120, 000 employees.

[00:30:26] For us, it was also a way to have open conversations about the implications Our algorithms implications of our recommender system. What does it mean? For, for, uh, for, uh, for clients, what does it mean for trust as a bank? Uh, and eventually it was a way to provoke decision makers, uh, and open the eyes on, on future possibilities that they could actually grasp and understand.

[00:30:50] Uh, and at that stage, I think nobody really knew we were doing Zen fiction within BVA. It was a, during a period of, uh, Of the design thinking kind of, uh, create craziness. And for me, that’s kind of when the penny dropped, because it, it, it didn’t really matter, um, that people would understand if we do this in fiction or no, because I think it’s more, this infection is more of a mindset.

[00:31:17] It’s not a process. It’s not a workshop. It’s a mindset. Like whenever there’s an opportunity to express whatever you, an idea about the future, there is, An opportunity to present that as a tangible object, as an artifact. There’s something that is different. It’s something that is not a demo. And something that is not a PowerPoint presentation.

[00:31:38] And I think that my team of technologists really, they got it. I also hired a couple of designers to help shape and give shape to these, to these fictions. Um, but eventually for me, kind of, that was kind of a successful experience of having design fiction and prototypes in general, um, reaching, um, the minds of, of the peers.

[00:32:07] So other 120, 000 employees, because we would have kind of, uh, uh, uh, moments where we could share that to many, to thousands of employees, but also share that at the, at the executive level. And kind of for the, for the little anecdotes, kind of, for me, the beauty of using fiction is when I would receive a call of somebody telling me, Oh, I’ve seen your fiction.

[00:32:27] Can I have the, Kind of the original file and can I change it for my next presentation? Because I would love to present something that it’s similar to yours, but I would love to use my language. Uh, so this appropriation of, uh, of an artifact in the future, it’s kind of, that’s the beauty of that. So that’s a bit of the experience of, of, uh, data analytics.

[00:32:51] Jorge Camacho: It’s great. It sounds like as if you were. Almost getting to the point where design fiction was becoming almost like a way to translate, uh, concepts and ideas and visions across multiple disciplines. You have scientists, technologists using design fiction to communicate with people from business, from other areas, and design fiction almost like a, uh, A way to translate these different, uh, ways of understanding the world and be able to converge.

[00:33:19] I also think it’s interesting that you, um, that you say that you hacked the design language of this big organization for the purpose of design fiction and then back into the larger organization. I believe that, uh, I see something similar and moving to another interesting recent project. I see something similar in terms of.

[00:33:42] Hacking the language of organization of an organization for building design fiction in the work that you have done with Ikea. So I know you have prepared a few images also, and I wondering if you Fabian or Julian want to talk a little bit about how you collaborated with Ikea, and how you brought design fiction for that.

[00:34:04] Julian Bleecker: Yeah, I can I can address that. So, . Um, so there, there, we’ve done a few projects with, uh, with IKEA and with research groups who are working with ikea. I think maybe the one that, uh, Fabian is showing now is. The first one, which has traveled quite extensively. Um, and the, we were asked by the mobile research center, which, uh, at the time, uh, Jeffrey Brown was, uh, was running and we wanted to, essentially they wanted to do a design fiction project for their grad students, like come, come and then we can learn more about it.

[00:34:37] And I proposed rather than just doing a generic workshop, why don’t we actually execute something? And like, let’s create. This this catalog of the IKEA we imagine in the future, and it was particularly powerful. I think in this context that it was a brand like IKEA because it’s so it’s got certain level of ubiquity.

[00:34:58] People register and recognize the style visually in these kinds of things. And all those elements are super important in order to have an effective design fiction. It’s oftentimes much better not to make up. Company or brand, but to really kind of pull on because you want to operate in this liminal space between what people know and don’t think twice about and give them a moment of what I call the double take moment where they look at something and they’re like, Okay, I know what that is.

[00:35:27] And then they look again. Wait a minute. What’s going on here? And the point of that is, I think one of the core aspects of design fiction is that you want to open up a discussion. You want to provide a point of entry for someone to immerse themselves in this world. And it’s very much I learned a lot. I’m a huge film fan.

[00:35:42] Um, obviously I taught at the film school at USC, one of the things that I learned is just that little trick of kind of drawing people into the narrative. There must be like a technical term for it but it’s like when you open the mystery cabinet and you walk through it, or you you trip and you stumble down the rabbit hole, whatever your whatever your motives or.

[00:36:01] Uh, you some, in some films, uh, they’ll, you’ll show, uh, um, in Robocop it was done quite effectively where there’s just a series of, of essentially like constructed advertisements and new segments in order to kind of bring you into the setting up the context, setting the frame, uh, providing the me on sand for the rest of what’s going on.

[00:36:22] And that’s one of the things that’s absolutely crucial for an effective bit of design fiction. So we did that with the IKEA catalog. We wanted to show essentially like a home future. What is the home experience of the future? What are the things that Ikea might get involved in in the future? And then bring those elements back, not as a trend report or not as a, as a short story, but as the actual artifact and doing it, going all the way to the limit, so actually manufacturing the catalog, uh, figuring out the right font, the right graphic design, making sure that it feels like it could, it was something that.

[00:36:57] That that you as the design fiction practitioner as the futures designer got into a really crappy time travel machine went to some future was given a few moments to grab some stuff and you happen to grab this from someone’s mailbox. And then you kind of came back to the present, what would you have, you wouldn’t come back with a short story, you wouldn’t back with, you might come back with some photographs, but you wouldn’t come back with something like a narrative.

[00:37:22] Right. You come back with artifacts. I grabbed a bunch of stuff. Let’s see what we got. And then you put it on the table and you kind of go through it. And this is one of those things. And it was just, you know, we didn’t spend a lot of time invested in precisely what we would expect to see in this future.

[00:37:38] We just took some of the idioms from the, from the day when we did this. I can’t even remember when this project was. 2000 something or other. Drones were a big thing. People are talking about, um, uh, sort of not the virtual reality we’re talking about now, but it was on the horizon. We’re talking about autonomous agents.

[00:37:54] We’re talking about, uh, there’s a kind of biomorphic materials was another aspect. So you see that appearing in some of the, uh, the, the, the particular things that you might have in your bathroom and then we just wrap it up. Like you make it feel like as if you could buy this stuff, all you need to do is look for the order form or go to the website.

[00:38:12] And that’s what we were, that’s what we wanted to do with this.

[00:38:17] Jorge Camacho: I love the idea of traveling and some of the members of the audience are also saying how we love the idea of traveling, uh, to the future and coming back. And as you say, you couldn’t, you wouldn’t bring back a story. Perhaps you wouldn’t also be able to, uh, bring back a piece of furniture, for example, but you may be able to bring back the catalog.

[00:38:35] And that in itself is like a window to that, to that future. Um, can you, can you explain a little bit more about this other, uh, more recent project from, from Ikea?

[00:38:44] Julian Bleecker: Yeah. So this was one we did. It was a very, very, very short sprint. Um, I think it was maybe over the course of like three or four weeks last winter, uh, where Katie McCrory, who, um, is, is, uh, does a lot of their, um, really important comms work for their life at home report, which is, um, from what one of the largest qualitative and quantitative studies done globally on life at home.

[00:39:07] So they do this every year. And oftentimes at the end of it, they come back with what you might expect. So like a big, uh, landscaped oriented, um, essentially PowerPoint PDF of lots of research data. Um, with that, with that, that a graphic designer has gone to and made the graphs and charts look right. Um, I don’t mean to diminish the importance of the work, but what I’m focusing on is the way in which it’s communicated.

[00:39:30] And Katie, To to her credit was reflecting on maybe there better ways we can communicate this or other additional ways we can communicate it. And so she reached out to us sort of at the last minute of the program to say, like, Hey, can we do some design fiction work? We’re actually doing a magazine to go along with the, you know, the PowerPoint research report.

[00:39:54] Um, I’m looking for a fun, more effective way of communicating this work. And so that’s where we kind of came It was, it was, it was a very quick, what I would call like our typical kind of three phase project. The first phase is like, wait, what are you talking about? What do you got? Where’s your research?

[00:40:12] Let’s talk about that. Let’s look at that first. And so we did a kind of collaborative deep dive into the research with their their qual and quantity heads of research, kind of giving us the summary, the same summary that they probably deliver to the executives of IKEA. And we just sat and listened. And tried to synthesize it and think about what are the things that are, that they’re, uh, where are the highlights, where are the interesting elements that might drop out?

[00:40:40] Like if I was hearing this, what does all this look like? If I got into my crappy time travel device, what is the result of these things? What are the, how do they, how could they exhibit themselves of symptoms of these? insights of these trends that they’re already seeing today. Um, and through that in a very rapid iterative way, like phase two was let’s synthesize this.

[00:41:03] Let’s kind of bring all this material in and see what kind of pops out. And this is a very highly intuitive aspect of the work. You have to get rid of your, your effort to achieve a very particular outcome and just see where that this is where the magic happens, where one of the things, one of the elements in the hearing that might become a thing or some kind of some kind of representation of these insights.

[00:41:28] And some of the things that started popping out was about The unique ways in which people were maintaining community during a pandemic. So these very interesting, curious ways in which they were sharing their experiences. So there were some things that they found where people were like just 24 7 sharing the view out their window.

[00:41:44] You’ve probably seen some of these things where they were. They were finding ways to share resources with neighbors, particularly in dense urban blocks. Communicating with neighbors and really, you know, improvisational ways. Um, uh, all these kinds of things were interesting. And then what then people were actually, it seemed some of the research people are showing lots of, um, they were doing lots of gardening and tending in the general sense.

[00:42:09] Tending to their own, their own selves, self care, uh, tending to the different needs of their families, particularly as people were not able to, you know, young children, not able to move out. What are the, what are we going to do? How are we going to kind of keep them active? And then people were actually doing literal gardening.

[00:42:24] And so all these things kind of came around to this thing where we created this, we created this idea that there would be, uh, that, that there would be a, um, like a home, a home gardening, um, Angle to what Ikea did in the future, whether or not it was something that they actually created or they kind of represented and facilitated didn’t really matter.

[00:42:42] But this was the element that we were that we were focused on and the ways in which that became a locus for community with people sharing what they were creating, how they were actually growing different kinds of vegetables and this sort of stuff. So it was, it was, it’s just like a little corner. It’s not the solution.

[00:42:58] You’re just looking for that symptom of a new world that is somehow revitalized based on what we were looking at, which was an extrapolation of these trends into a more habitable future. So not going the cyberpunk route, more going the solar punk route, I guess you could say.

[00:43:15] Jorge Camacho: That’s excellent. Thank you.

[00:43:16] And, um, something I’m trying to do is try to continue the conversation, but I’m also sort of like weaving some of the questions from the audience already. And so, for example, uh, these last, uh, explanation that you gave us about the work that you did with, with IKEA more recently, I think it’s a, it’s a great answer to, uh, uh, Mitchell, uh, who, uh, early on, uh, I’m going to ask you to walk us through what the same fiction and how to build and use one.

[00:43:40] And I think this this last example perfectly answers that question. Um, then a little bit after that, and here I’m switching to some of the questions from the audience. Uh, Mark Mulker in, uh, asks you, do you know of anyone who is using design fiction to create more immersive? forward looking theatrical experiences, and if so, who and how?

[00:44:06] And I’m bringing this question because I think that maybe some of the work that you did recently with the Museum of the Future in Dubai could be Uh, you know, could be a good example of trying to do something more, more immersive. Um, so, uh, do you think that, that fits the, the description? And, and if so, can you, can you share a little bit about that work?

[00:44:27] Fabien Girardin It really, it does, it does really. Um, so I, I, I actually, it’s great. I have a couple of slides about that. So the museum, the future is, is recently open. And they’ve commissioned many design studios and many studios in speculative design and fiction to work on helping them set up the kind of the first exhibit permanent exhibit for the museum feature.

[00:44:52] So, so it’s a. It’s um, and the museum of the future is an institution for design of innovation. Um, and it’s in Dubai and the idea is to translate like technological opportunities, but also warning indicators about the future and make them. Tangible and understandable to the many people. Um, so that’s why they go for the immersive experience.

[00:45:20] So, uh, there are, there are four, four levels within that, that museum. And we worked on one of them. It’s level five. It’s an, an orbit station called Hope that offers an immersive journey. Uh, for in 2071 for space pioneers. Um, so what they present there and what the visitors might experience is kind of all the technological development that helped improve the situation of earth today.

[00:45:49] But, um, but looking into the future, um, and, uh, and really our focus and kind of, that’s a lot of work that we do on the Futuraltory, we focus on every day. So I think they, they hired us or helped us, they asked us to, to contribute because we would focus on the mundane and all the kind of personal gears and personal items that we could actually put in that space.

[00:46:13] To make it feel like to suspend the disbelief that space parodies actually live there. Um, uh, so that’s what we did. We design several kind of artifacts, um, for that experience and the way that we did, uh, that our approach was really to look at, um, at the past, like the space race, uh, and the background stories around space space to look at the present.

[00:46:41] And look at the international space station. There’s a fantastic project called the international space station archeology project that looks at this technological structure, uh, through the lenses of, um, cultural material. And that’s what we were fascinated with, like take all the kind of observations that we can have of.

[00:47:01] astronauts and cosmonauts and how they bring culture, how they have culture out there. What is, what are the rituals and behaviors? Um, and we also, obviously we took like the weak signals and observations for, uh, from science fiction and, and so on. And, and our approach was really, again, like iterative. It sounds like there was a process from step one to step five of producing that.

[00:47:26] We really, that kind of use all these weak signals and observations to Produce briefs and then produce, um, artifacts that we would share with the creative director of the museum. And, um, maybe just to give one example and something I really liked doing in this project is one classic example, for instance, of, of design fiction.

[00:47:49] Artifact is the, the, the snack. Here packaging, because it opens, it gives a lot of opportunity to talk about many different aspects of the future, uh, in terms of logistics, in terms of, uh, food culture and so on. So, uh, so packaging is, is kind of a classic artifact, but we also went into more kind of cultural artifact.

[00:48:11] And what we did is also to design, um, And do a lexicon of future language of space, space Creole, we have different kind of cultures working together and being in space together. What does it mean, how does that evolve. So we create a kind of a lexicon a little dictionary. of terms that were made up and then we would add them and put them into the personal artifacts of the space pioneers that visitors could, could look at it.

[00:48:40] So our day, for instance, here is kind of a, somebody kind of wrote it on, on some of these fictional photo from the future. And it’s a made up word of, of something, somebody missing earth. Uh, it’s a mix of different languages. So just as a way to, to kind of, um, uncover these kinds of implications in the future, uh, of, of people missing something and, and kind of the psychological implication of being in orbit that we wanted also to bring, and not only, not only focus on the technology that we’re behind, uh, this kind of, uh, endeavor.

[00:49:17] Jorge Camacho: Thank you, Fabien. That’s, that’s great. Uh, you know, the, the, the work that I’ve been able to see that From what I’ve been able to see from afar about the museum of the future, I think it’s interesting because there’s a long history of these big exhibitions trying to imagine the future. Space travel has been like a constant in these in these efforts, I don’t know, since the 50s 60s, etc.

[00:49:41] And, and this leads me to one of the, one of the questions from the audience, Eileen Alexander is asking you. Because of course comparing the machine from the future from to Futurama from the 60s allows you to see the way in which it has the future’s imagination has evolved. But even without going so far into the past, Aileen asks you, uh, how has the way people think about the future evolved over the years since you started the Near Future Laboratory?

[00:50:13] Have you seen any changes in the way that people imagine the future since you started? Exploring the near future.

[00:50:23] Fabien Girardin I have, I have maybe one, one observation is like, for me, the future is becoming everybody’s business. Uh, so it’s not necessarily a different way to see the future, but I think that more people are, are, are kind of.

[00:50:39] And I think we are in a moment in history that, uh, like more and more people are trying to, um, yeah, have an impact or understand how we can have an impact on what is coming. So there’s the understanding of what’s coming, but also in the understanding of how do we, um, how do we test the ideas around what is coming and that’s kind of museum.

[00:51:01] The future is a bit of that kind of having a free space to test ideas. As you can, uh, and not everything is, is. Many things are questionable on what is presented there, but it’s just, it’s the point, uh, there, it’s, there is a sandbox to do that. Uh, so maybe kind of the different ways the evolution for me is that, and the other one is kind of the prototype to be able to build things is, it’s become way more easier now than, uh, 10 years ago.

[00:51:30] And, um, and I think it’s design fiction, speculative design generally is, is, is a consequence of that.

[00:51:39] Julian Bleecker: Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s a really, it’s a really good question. Um, I think what, what it, what, uh, what the idiom future certainly has evolved. Um, if I were to be specific about it, I, there are a couple, there are a couple of examples.

[00:51:55] One was, uh, I watched an episode of that show, uh, inventing Anna, which is a wonderful drama. And at one point, one of the characters, uh, is being asked, how do you want me to describe you? And it’s a very Silicon Valley kind of bro y sort of character. And he says, How about futurist? And I was like, okay, that’s it.

[00:52:12] It’s cooked in the writer’s room. They’re making a kind of slightly smarmy, not very cool guy referred to himself as a futurist. I was like, okay, I need to scrub that from

[00:52:26] Jorge Camacho: nearby.

[00:52:27] Julian Bleecker: Yeah. And I think there’s some validity to that. I feel like it’s been, it’s a term that is kind of, uh, it, it requires a certain kind of sensibility to call oneself that.

[00:52:37] And I always had a little bit of an instinct of that because it’s associated with someone who is, uh, who prognosticates, who knows something that other people don’t and will deliver is their, their magical insights from, from on high to those who are struggling to understand what, what comes next. And, and I’m very much into, uh, Just I mean, in my my instinct is opposed to that, because I don’t think what we do, at least in the future laboratory is predict we kind of reveal implications we kind of help do the set dressing around a particular world and use that as a way of facilitating people immersing themselves and their imagination and things that they know to help guide them.

[00:53:19] It’s very much more like, like, uh, Therapist therapist in a way than it is like a prognosticator. Um, and so, but there are there are in my, my kind of professional trajectory. One thing that I’ve come to really embrace and understand as as naive as it might sound to say it is, is that it’s always changing.

[00:53:42] What what people understand about and it’s not and it’s not just changing for us who are actively involved in trying to understand it and make sense of things as they evolve, but also their generations behind us who look at, they’re like, No, no, that’s not my future, that might have been yours. But I grew up under a different set of circumstances, I watched different shows I was involved in different kind of cultural kind of happenings my aesthetic sensibilities are entirely different.

[00:54:07] And I want something different. And so whereas we wanted the cyberpunk. Hunter killer drone, artificial intelligence, kind of taking care of everything future. There’s a generation of people who are kind of like, actually, we don’t want that. That’s not what we imagine. And so either get out of the way or help us realize this, this, this kind of the future that we want.

[00:54:27] And so that to me is like one of those markers of like how things evolve. People are asking different questions and they have different

[00:54:34] Jorge Camacho: desires. That’s, that’s great. Thank you. Um, I think we have time for one, one more question and we have Scott Smith, uh, also a colleague. From you and from us at IFTF here in the audience, and he’s asking you this.

[00:54:49] How do you think about definitional decay? interpreting the same fiction in ways that are convenient to other practitioners or practices, but not necessarily keeping with the initial spirit of the practice. Are there definable boundaries? Does it matter? Is

[00:55:08] Julian Bleecker: it?

[00:55:10] Jorge Camacho: I mean, I think I think Scott is talking about

[00:55:13] Julian Bleecker: the

[00:55:13] Jorge Camacho: extent to which you can, you can, uh, if I’m correct, translate.

[00:55:19] Uh, design fiction into other practices without perhaps, uh, losing the initial spirit or even does, does it matter if it loses the initial spirit?

[00:55:30] Julian Bleecker: Yeah. Uh, so, so my dad, I’m curious what Fabian thinks is he’s, he’s got his thinking face on, um, is the, is, uh, yeah, I’ve, I’ve had conversations with people where they’ll say like, Oh, I did some design fiction.

[00:55:45] Here’s my story. And I, and I feel like there’s a little bit of like, I try to do a little bit of kind of hopefully constructive policing. Like it’s almost like you call it whatever you want. My understanding is that you’re doing design, not writing and design for me as a material making practice. It’s not a storytelling practice.

[00:56:04] And I think so. I think so. If, if there is, I guess what Scott’s describing as a high Scott as definitional decay, I think Um, in that you start losing hold of the meaning, the thing that you meant when you, you know, like when I first wrote the essay and, and, and trying to fill that in and kind of give that substance and weight and, um, there’s, there’s only so much you can do.

[00:56:28] But you in this case for design fiction, because I think it is a very important, almost not, not to overblow it, but like existentially crucial in that it is, is an activity that I think is a very highly effective way of helping people imagine other possible worlds. And maybe, you know, as effective, it may be even more effective than science fiction as a prose.

[00:56:51] Writing thing. So I real that’s a boundary that I continue to police to say you need to make a thing. And, um, and providing a point of entry for people to learn how to make a thing in order to practice design fiction, I think is important. So definitional decay get totally get it. Fabien,

[00:57:08] Jorge Camacho: we have like 30 seconds if you want to add something to Julian’s answer.

[00:57:14] Fabien Girardin No, it’s, it’s, it’s for, I think it’s one reason why we, we wrote the book on the manual of design fiction is because we felt that, uh, um, that the practice was being kind of sometimes maybe misused at least to our own eyes. I think we, it’s great that it’s being, um, people build on it. Uh, but it’s true that there are, I think doing the manual, we found out what are these essential elements, and we are, we can articulate them now.

[00:57:41] And I think a few years ago we were kind of observing other people doing the, in fiction with a, we had the guts feeling. It was not like. It was not that. And now I think we reached the moment where we can be more categorical about what, what it is and what it’s not without, without putting strong boundaries and creating another discipline, which is exactly what we want to do.

[00:58:03] But, but I think that this essential element is. Uh, exist as, as, uh, Julian mentioned.

[00:58:11] Jorge Camacho: Thank you so much, uh, Fabian and Julian. This, I mean, this went super quickly. I’m gonna uh, pass the, the, the mic to lean who’s gonna close and thank you so much for inviting me. It did conversation super quickly.

[00:58:23] Host: Thank you so much.

[00:58:25] There’s just, like, scratching the surface. So interesting. Um, can you guys put the link to the book in the chat so that everyone has one more chance to. Remember where they can get this amazing contribution that you have made. Um, I do want to remind people, if you’re interested in IFTF perspective on design futures, um, we have a class coming up May 5th and to the 19th with Jake Dunnigan and Jacques Garcia, our colleague in Brazil.

[00:58:54] Um, and also Alana Lipset. It’s a really fun, fast moving class with its own set of tools and approaches to doing design. design futures. Um, and then the next talk that we’ll be holding in this series is going to be with, um, Jeff Yang, our, um, colleague who just wrote, came out with a book on the history of Asian American culture.

[00:59:16] He’s going to be talking with Don Chan, who is a longtime editor at Art Forum. They’re going to be talking about, um, Kind of techno orientalist futures. Why foresight as a practice needs a feedback loop. That’ll be at 5 p. m. May 25th. Please join us for that. And with that, um, have a wonderful day, evening, afternoon, and thank you so much, Jorge, Fabian, Julian.

[00:59:41] Um, thank you so much. It was a wonderful conversation.

[00:59:45] Julian Bleecker: Thanks you guys. Good seeing you. Good to see you. Bye bye.

[00:59:49] Host: Bye bye.