Creative R&D for teams working on what comes next.

A familiar idiom has stopped working

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

An emerging capability needs meaning

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 product direction is still being discovered

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.

AI is amongst us — what are the opportunities?

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.

Applied Speculation Inquiry

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.

Strategic Artifact Engagement

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.

Working Session

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.

Embedded / Advisory Practice

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.

Technology in everyday life

AI and emerging technologies understood through products, interfaces, organizations, incentives, rituals, governance, and everyday use.

Speculative model worlds

Small designed scenarios, tiny films, maquettes, artifacts, and prototypes for rehearsing unfamiliar behaviors, agentic interactions, and second-order consequences.

Failures of imagination

Methods for surfacing unknowns, anxieties, hopes, edge cases, and misalignments that conventional strategy, policy, or engineering processes often miss.

AI Policy & Governance

Current focus | Artifact-led inquiry | Institutional consequences

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.

Organizational Imagination / Speculative Prototyping

Current manuscript

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.