The Project

The Brief

Take the trends of the day, the hottest items on the Gartner Hype Curve and then use Design Fiction to represent the implications thereof in the form of a weird slightly junk mail catalog in which all of our hopes, dreams, fascinations and fetishizations of technology and its promises have resulted in bottom-dollar commodity stuff. The goal was to create a printed publication that felt like an actual product catalog and put the catalog itself on the Near Future Laboratory Shop for sale as the canonical exemplar of Design Fiction.

The Design Fiction Approach

Our approach was one that has proven out as a viable methodology for workshopping futures. We use immersion, sketching, and rich, meaningful discussion. If you can gather the right kind of expansive, creative thinker who is an interested, engaged, curious individual, more inclined to generate and be generous and to speculate and discuss possibilities, beautiful unexpected ideas and activities will obtain.

The Process

In the spring of 2012, I sent out a simple email to a dozen individuals who I thought would be intrigued by the challenge of imagining the future of the day’s current trends. That email went out to a group that included product designers, engineers, museum curators, design directors, film makers, industrial designers, science-fiction authors, university professors. I proposed a workshop for the fall (October 2012) in Detroit with a plan to spend one day in the archives of the Henry Ford Museum, and two days in downtown Detroit at a campus of the University of Michigan, who offered facilities, equipment, and some amazing technical support staff.

Our process consisted of two phases: Immersion/Workshop followed by Design Production. The Immersion Workshop was three days, resulting in broad strokes of categories and exemplars for those categories. This was followed by an extended intermission of several months, the Design Production phase, an intensive six week production effort of print catalog design, including image sourcing, product description writing, test printing and review.

Near Future Laboratory’s Role

We defined the project and faciliated its organization in collaboration with a team of co-organizers based in Detroit, Professor John Marshall and Cezanne Charles. We ultimately completed the ideation to fully populate a 112 page Design Fiction product catalog, did the visual design, layout, and oversaw the manufacturing of the printed publication, managed shipping and sales of the final TBD Catalog which is available at https://shop.nearfuturelaboratory.com now in its 10th Anniversary Edition. TBD Catalog has gone through 3 printings and has sold over 7000 copies.

The main trends were the buzz of 2012, including Wearables, AI, Algorithmic Everything, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency, Surveillance, Augmented Reality, Big Data, Crowd Funding, Social Networks.

We also created a resource kit consisting of the first Design Fiction Product Design Work Kit for ideation and inspiration, along with a book of fictional product names and product companies.

Phase 1 - Immersion Workshop / Detroit

This phase was a gathering in Detroit starting with an immersion day in the archives of the Henry Ford Museum to explore the rich history of the industrial age. The Henry Ford Museum’s ‘back room’ archives represent 90% of their collection, with the minority of artifacts on display.

Thanks to our relationship with the Henry Ford Museum’s Chief Curator, we were granted access to explore the minutae of design and innovation as represented by the mundane artifacts of everyday life — from presidential candidate buttons to McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. This gave us a firm basis to imagine into the kinds of meaningful artifacts that populate our humble and everyday corners of our lives.

This was followed by a two days workshopping in downtown Detroit, including explorations into Dollar Stores, bodegas, convenience marts in order to collect everyday kinds of artifacts from today for discussion. The point of gathering boring items was to remind ourselves that there is a sense of ‘necessity’ to these kind of items and this should be considered a kind of inspiration. We also reminded ourselves that these are the things that can be easily taken for granted. We take aspirin, hand-held global communicators and portable power (batteries) for granted today. These are things that you can pick up at a corner store without thinking about it. But 150 years ago these were futuristic, science-fictional ideas.

How can we take the futuristic things of today and represent them as the ‘taken for granted’? How can we make a ‘product catalog from a possible future’ feel as though it came from today’s future? Can we make it feel like something we might find in someone’s recycling bin, grabbed it, and then brought it back to today in order to help us make some sense of today’s tomorrow?

Phase 2 - Design Production

Phase 1 in which about a dozen participants helped create the rough framework for the kinds of products that might represent the future of the trends of 2012.

It is typical of workshops like this that, once parties depart, the ‘hard work’ of capturing and transforming the energy and creating some tangible outcome is, well — hard. People go back to their daily lives and work and the focus of an immersive workshop dissipates.

In this case, the plan was to take the 20 or so product starters that were developed in the workshop and increasing that by a factor of five or more. This proved challenging and it was impossible to get the attention of attendees sufficient to continue the work. After a lengthy pause, I decided to commission a graphic artist to collaborate with me to speed things along, and began working on developing nearly 100 future product for the catalog, including art (images and associated graphics), product names, catalog-type descriptions, pricing, sales conditions, small text, warnings, symbology and small graphics. The graphic designer took the responsibility of laying out the contents in InDesign.

This workflow was sufficient to populate a rich and vibrant future product catalog, including classified ads, editorial text, cover design and more. This took about 8 weeks of part-time activity.

Throughout, Near Future Laboratory was responsible for creating all of the principle imagery, designing the catalog flatplan, author product catalog items, and editorially manage the necessary consistency of ‘the world’.

After Action Report

TBD Catalog is the first and canonical Design Fiction artifact. It serves as a reference and primary exemplar of what a Design Fiction artifact is, and the importance of connecting research, foresight, and vision to the creation of an actual material artifact that gets off the screen and into a tangible form.

The workshop approach has served as a repeatable model for doing Design Fiction. It is one we have brought to many clients in order to help unlock creative potential in an deeply engaging and imaginative way.

The ‘Product Catalog’ is a useful archetype for representing consumer futures, strategic foresight/futures, and for translating consumer research into a tangible form that can augment futures reports.