Julian Bleecker | Designer, engineer, creative R&D partner
Creative R&D for emerging technology, product and brand experiences, trends and futures research, and strategy and governance assessment and exploration.
Julian Bleecker is a designer, engineer, and creative R&D partner who joins teams working on what comes next. He makes emerging technologies, products, and experiences tangible through prototypes, artifacts, stories, and experiments.
Creative R&D · Product and experience prototyping · Creative technology · Brand experience · Futures research
Featured Creative R&D
A photographic ethnography made with skater Eddie “Mighty” Moreno. The field guide brings photography, aerial imagery, mapping, and publishing together to represent a Southern California skateboarding culture: its landscape, informal routes, tools, and rules of access.
A public art and software experiment from a 25+ year practice of making creative projects with technology, turning mobile devices, personal memory, and city movement into an experience of writing your own city.
Featured in the Whitney Museum’s Fall retrospective
Explore the experiment
A collaborative writing instrument exploring a near future where AI helps develop writing skills and where human-AI exchange feel like a timed, improvisational practice. Like Jazz.
Published / working prototype
See the prototypeA hybrid analog-digital cycling computer carried from an early hardware study through engineering, manufacturing, and product launch. I developed the concept. (Check!) Engineered the tech. (Check!) Wrote the patent. (Check!) Crafted the brand. (Check!) Launched the product. (Check!) Sold the company. (Check!)
Acquired
See the product workA physical messaging device that delivers instant messages slowly, turning communication into a study of time, patience, and anticipation.
Published / project archive
Explore the projectA book and film project documenting the gestures and everyday rituals that appeared as networked devices became ordinary.
Published
See the artifactA domestic-device study exploring trust and social data through applied speculation. Through ideation, design, fabrication, and testing, the team represented a strategy theme in product form, with implications for product-range implementations, new app ideas, and policy conversations.
Prototype build / product ideation / applied speculation
About, availability, and contact
I work with creative and product leaders when an emerging capability needs a human form, a working prototype, a public artifact, or production support.
What I Make
That form might be a product, ritual, publication, interface, event, story, object, or live experience. The work can begin with a technical capability, a product direction, a cultural question, or a situation where familiar formats no longer help.
The available forms and metaphors no longer carry the condition at hand. A new artifact, format, or situated example can activate conversations that would otherwise not happen. Long-lived teams are comfortable in their idioms, ways of working, ways of fixing on what makes sense, and what does not make sense. Bringing in an external perspective with an artifact that otherwise would struggle to find a voice can move an organization into unfamiliar terrain and help it explore the implications of a new product, service, or technology.
The wheels-on-luggage problem
A technological capability, emerging signals or trends, or institutional condition needs to be explored through artifacts, products, interfaces, scenarios, or public media. How a new capability becomes meaningful, useful, and ordinary is often not obvious. A tangible artifact can help a team explore the implications of a new capability, its consequences, and its possible futures.
A team has a set of signals, hunches, materials, and technical possibilities that deserve a voice to explore, test, and translate into a product, service, or experience. Now, what does that product, service, or experience look like? How does it behave? What are its consequences? What is its meaning? A tangible artifact that takes a team into unfamiliar possible futures can help a team explore the implications of a new capability, its consequences, and its possible futures.
Beyond the hype, the AI conversation is full of unknowns, anxieties, and hopes. What are the opportunities for product, service, and product design? Artifacts, creative R&D, applied speculation, speculative R&D is a form of applied research that can identify the opportunities, the challenges, and the unknown possibilities that will not reveal themselves with traditional incremental product design or strategy work.
Selected Work
Strategy Fiction and Anticipatory Research: taking today's signals, trends, memes, hopes, fears, and desires and translating them into the vernacular of near-future news stories, ads, speculative jobs, classifieds, product reviews, and found-media fragments.
Extends artifact-led futures work into a living publication format that can expose policy, model-behavior, and governance implications before they settle into defaults.
Used the familiar language of a catalog to compress debate, surface assumptions, and explore adjacent possibilities through artifacts.
Turned unclear futures into inspectable objects that exposed assumptions, risks, and options for decision makers.
A newspaper from an AI future that reframed strategic and policy conversations around model behavior, delegated authority, institutional defaults, and governance.
Helps leaders move from AI anxiety or hype to specific questions about consequences, agentic interactions, governance, trust, and organizational action.
Founded OMATA and built the OMATA One from prototype into a manufactured hardware product and product company.
Shows entrepreneurial execution: imagining a future product, building it, shipping it, operating the company around it, and selling the business.
Created a future annual report for OMATA, the company I founded in 2015, to make the company vision tangible, legible, and operationally discussable.
Shows Design Fiction used as practical company strategy. The annual report helped establish a shared north star and was instrumental in the successful pitch and sale of OMATA.
A book and film project documenting the gestures, habits, and rituals that appeared as networked devices became ordinary.
Shows how weak signals become material evidence for understanding what emerging technology is doing in ordinary life.
A near-future convenience store exercise that used familiar retail formats to make changing expectations around convenience tangible.
Turns a broad cultural and product question into inspectable objects people can compare, critique, and decide around.
A 72-page magazine from a possible autonomous vehicle future, created to make strategic implications legible for leadership teams.
Shows how a future-facing publication artifact can turn a complex technology shift into something leaders can inspect and debate together.
A Design Fiction workshop with IxDA that used the humble quick-start guide to explore the human, data, mobility, and service questions around a fictional self-driving car.
Shows how a familiar instruction format can force a team to move from abstract mobility futures into specific use cases, edge cases, and decisions about everyday life with a new technology.
A physical toolkit of prompt cards for generating possible future products, services, user experiences, scenarios, and artifacts.
Shows the method becoming a usable object: a hands-on tool people can use to practice making futures tangible.
Ways Of Working
Typical engagements develop around research, artifacts, prototypes, experience design, and other forms that typically arise as a futures-oriented strategic question and its technical, cultural, brand-aligned and institutional present state. The work can be a single artifact, a prototype, a workshop, or an embedded engagement with a team. The work is often exploratory and generative, and it can be used to inform product strategy, design, brand positioning and development.
When to use
Use this when a live question needs research, artifacts, and prototypes that can hold its social, technical, and institutional dimensions together.
What you get
A focused body of artifacts, scenarios, and prototype studies that give the question a richer form.
The work gives people something situated to return to, compare, and develop together.
When to use
Use this when a strategy, technology shift, market possibility, or policy question needs an artifact that can carry its implications into a fuller world.
What you get
An artifact with enough texture to be circulated, examined, and used in the contexts where the question is alive.
Artifacts carry propositions through a culture in ways that decks and reports rarely do.
When to use
Use this when a group needs time with a question, a set of artifacts, and the conditions surrounding them.
What you get
A shared encounter with the material, named tensions, and questions worth carrying forward.
A well-made artifact gives a group more to work with than generalized future language.
When to use
Use this when a company wants applied speculation alongside an evolving product, research, policy, strategy, or communications practice.
What you get
An experienced independent contributor who can frame questions, make artifacts, build prototypes, convene people, and connect technical work to its wider conditions.
This is often how an applied speculation practice begins inside an organization.
Research and Methods
These perspectives help me notice how a capability changes behavior, relationships, institutions, and everyday life. Each method connects back to something made: a project, artifact, prototype, workshop, or conversation.
AI and emerging technologies understood through products, interfaces, organizations, incentives, rituals, governance, and everyday use.
Small designed scenarios, tiny films, maquettes, artifacts, and prototypes for rehearsing unfamiliar behaviors, agentic interactions, and second-order consequences.
Methods for surfacing unknowns, anxieties, hopes, edge cases, and misalignments that conventional strategy, policy, or engineering processes often miss.
Current work in AI policy and governance uses artifact-led scenarios and speculative prototypes to examine delegated authority, institutional trust, accountability, and public consequences as AI systems move into everyday workflows.
The work makes trust problems, governance gaps, and real-world consequences observable before they become normal operating conditions.
Current work in brand experiences uses speculative prototypes to explore evolutions of brand interactions and consumer experiences, focused specifically on what a brand experience could be in a near-future where AI, agentic systems, and emerging technologies are part of the everyday. How might a brand emerge autonomously from a set of agentic systems? How might a brand experience be designed to be emergent, adaptive, and responsive to the context of the user, the environment, and the social network?
A near future fictional brand experience can make the implications of agentic systems, emergent behavior, and adaptive experiences tangible enough to inspect, debate, and act on.
Selected Workshops
These sessions bring together research, discussion, prompts, artifacts, and hands-on making around a live question.
A workshop that used the familiar quick-start guide to work through the everyday questions raised by a fictional self-driving car.
A two-day Design Fiction convening where policy innovators and researchers considered the institutional and everyday effects of AI agents.
Rapid Design Fiction sprints for an Atlassian gathering, exploring possible outcomes for core products as AI became part of everyday work.
A hands-on workshop at LA Design Festival where participants made short podcasts from possible futures.
Selected Events
A two-day gathering of creative leaders at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Affleck House outside Detroit.
Screenings and conversations around Gary Hustwit’s generative documentary Eno, made with Brain Dead Studios.
A multi-day workshop that became TBD Catalog, a product catalog from a possible future.
Selected Keynotes
A keynote on Design Fiction and the role of artifacts in giving possible futures a form.
A keynote for the Neuroethics and the Future of Reality seminar, exploring virtual reality, augmented reality, AI, and neuroscience.
A keynote for Colombia’s Innovation Land Summit on the relationship between imagination and innovation.
Some Proof
Founder / operator proof
The strongest evidence that my judgment and ways of working reach beyond big ideas and vague concepts. Very few “futures-oriented” or creative technologists can point to commercially delivered products completed without a team. I carried a quite uncertain product bet through product definition, software, hardware, brand, manufacturing, operations, and sale — doing so with a small budget, the help of friends as a team, and a single responsible employee — myself.
Technical grounding
Engineering degree work and hands-on product-building experience keep the speculative work grounded — connected to feasibility, constraints, systems, and implementation.
Research grounding
A humanities Ph.D., graduate HCI and technology/culture research, and electrical/computer engineering foundations.
Method proof
A long-running artifact-led practice for making plausible futures tangible enough to inspect, debate, and act on.
Emerging-technology proof
Current work focuses on making institutional, operational, and public consequences of AI tangible before they normalize.
Executive learning proof
Teaching, seminars, and leadership sessions designed to improve judgment, alignment, and consequence-awareness rather than provide inspiration alone.
Some Writing
An in-progress book making the case for speculative prototyping as a practical way for teams to reason about commitments before they settle into operating defaults.
Shows the current direction of the work: organizational imagination as decision capability, not imagination as an end in itself.
A practical and canonical reference for design fiction and the use of artifacts to render futures tangible.
This book documents a practice I developed and evolved, from a short essay into a method for making possible futures tangible enough to inspect.
A concise statement of the strategic posture behind the broader body of work.
Frames imagination as a disciplined way to see options, consequences, and commitments before the familiar process takes over.
The broader Near Future Laboratory archive includes essays, primers, and project work spanning more than 20 years of work at the intersection of design, technology, and culture.
The archive shows the depth behind the decision-facing work here: methods, projects, artifacts, reflections, and long-term practice.