The Near Future Laboratory Podcast is a series of conversations with leading makers and thinkers who are passionate about creating more habitable near futures, hosted by Julian Bleecker — founder of the Near Future Laboratory, a platform for a distributed collective of design and technology-led studies, research, and implementations.

The Design Fiction Newsletter is about Julian’s thoughts and experiences materializing ideas, making strategy, and creating products through design. (I am currently moving the newsletter to a new platform and so am pausing subscriptions for a brief period of time.) Topics will range from 'Design Fiction' to design more generally to anything that feels inspiring and relevant to thinking about “what’s next” to general topics in and about connecting ideas and the imagination to their articulation as things in the world.

Julian developed the General Seminar framework in order to have a live gathering of individuals for a 60+ minute discussion on a topic. He did this in the fashion of the grad school seminars he fondly remember in which it was possible to develop an invigorated appreciation of a question or topic.

General Seminar takes this approach to discussions on topical, relevant, and contemporary subjects, such as cryptotechnology, augmented reality, machine learning, the metaverse, design fiction, decentralized autonomous organizations, and decentralized finance.

In General Seminar there are no experts with fully-formed and reified opinions. General Seminar is not a lecture. Everyone contributes, and no one person is in the spotlight. We all come to Seminar with an open mind and a desire to learn and share our insights and perspectives, especially on new, barely sensible concepts. We do this to stretch our imaginations and think beyond today to help fashion a sense as to what these concepts might become in the near future. There is space for everyone to contribute and we all remain mindful of how much space we take up with our own individual contributions so as to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to find their voice. That is to say, we value the hum of silence as we reflect, consider, listen to and share our collective thoughts.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine Julian decided, so long as very many people were staying at home, he would build a community to meet design-technology sorts of characters, and to spark conversations on topics of mutual interest.

He started holding ‘Office Hours’, now archived on the Near Future Laboratory’s Youtube Channel a weekly (every Friday at 9a PST) community gathering of thoughtful design, technology, sci-fi aficionados and novelists, scientist, researchers, makers, artists, journalists, film makers, production designers, foresight practitioners, generalists, and strategist — who all come together to discuss whatever is on their minds. Topics are truly extraordinary and unexpected. A great way to end the week and start the weekend.

The community has grown to nearly 2500 members all around the world in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Through an email list and active Discord community, the group continues conversations, and initiates projects of all sorts in between the weekly Friday gatherings.

Bleecker was interviewed by experience design agency Tellart’s ‘Design Non Fiction’ series, in which notable designers, technologists, and futurists described their practice and its relationship to technological and societal transformation.

In 2017 I was invited to give a lecture on Design Fiction at the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group.

IDEO presents a Design Fiction Evening, a discussion on the topic with Julian Bleecker, Nick Foster, James Bridle, Cliff Kuang, and Scott Patterson.

In 2009 I started focusing some creative energy to find my eye as a skateboard photographer. After doing this enthusiastically for a year I was searching for a new point of view through the camera. I found myself invited to photograph the top female skateboarders at a competition at the iconic Vans Combi Bowl. I saw so much energy and enthusiasm there that I decided to spend the next year doing nothing but photographing women’s skateboarding. That effort culminated in a successful Kickstarter campaign to launch the first photo book dedicated exclusively to the subject — Hello, Skater Girl. I’m proud to say that three of the young skateboarders I photographed have gone pro, and two are competing at the Tokyo Olympics — Amelia Brodka and Lizzie Armanto.

I went deep. I figured so long as I was in Southern California, shooting skateboarding, I should capture the canonical SoCal skateboarding vibe and started working with a crew as they hopped fences and skated empty backyard pools in derelict lots..and sometimes not-derelict lots. At the time I was working on a design brief while at Nokia on the nature and spirit of maps, outdoor guides and the like. I had prototyped one afternoon something called a ‘Forbidden Guide’ to unconventional destinations and sites. It was just a provocation to think about other kinds of guides and maps — showing unique and unusual spots to see and ways to get to them for tourists. That was the idea, in principle. And this idea stuck with me as I was working with the ‘Empty Backyard Pools’ material, which I eventually assembled into a fictional US National Park Service Field Guide that I called “Empty Backyard Pools — Los Angeles County Field Guide”.