Julian Bleecker, BSEE, MSEng, Ph.D. | Available for senior leadership, principal or fractional roles, and select advisory work
Julian Bleecker
Work at the overlap of imagination, prototyping, technology, and strategic sensemaking.
I’m strongest when something is still unclear and a team needs to get hold of it early. That usually means bringing product sense, technical fluency, prototyping, and strategic imagination together in the same place.
I’m not especially interested in being only the person who has the idea, or only the person who makes the prototype. The useful place for me is in helping give something enough form that people can actually see it, understand what it implies, and decide what to do next.
Available For
The kinds of roles where I do my best work.
I'm at my best when something is still unclear and a team needs to get hold of it early.
Senior in-house leadership
Head of design, innovation, creative R&D, or principal-level roles where strategy, prototyping, and cultural judgment need to work together.
Principal / fractional leadership
Shorter-horizon leadership support for teams standing up something new: a lab, a project, or a line of work that needs senior attention.
Advisory work
Targeted work with founders and executive teams who need help making ambiguous opportunities concrete enough to discuss, evaluate, and back.
Select workshops and talks
Workshops, seminars, and keynotes that support a larger piece of work rather than standing alone.
Role Signals
I have a cross-disciplinary senior profile built for ambiguous, high-consequence work.
No single title really covers it. I can move between strategy, design, engineering, research, writing, facilitation, and mentorship without losing rigor or momentum.
Proof
Here’s how my work extends beyond philosophy and ideas into leadership, execution, operating responsibility, and actionable practice.
Experience
20+ years
Across engineering, product, design, visual storytelling, branding, community building, teaching, entrepreneurship, and long-form authorship.
Leadership
Founder, operator, exit
Near Future Laboratory and OMATA, including defining a radically novel product, carrying it through product, brand, engineering, manufacturing, operations, and sale.
Teaching
Learning and development
From Professor at USC's famed School of Cinematic Arts, to public seminars, team and executive-oriented workshops, a long-running podcast, hundreds of weeks of weekly community office hours, and long-running mentorship formats.
Authorship
Books, primers, and methods
A body of writing that has shaped how organizations and designers think about futures and artifacts.
If you are evaluating me for a role, project, or hard problem, start with OMATA. It began with an ambiguous product definition that was radically novel, and it required me to carry the work through funding, product, brand, customer care, engineering, manufacturing, operations, and ultimately the sale of the company.
Selected Work
A selected set of projects that show my founder-level execution, strategic framing, and how I help teams develop new ways of working.
OMATA
Founded, built, and later sold a premium hardware-and-software company around a new relationship to data, craft, and sport.
Defined a radically novel product under ambiguity, then did the cross-disciplinary work to make it real, and carried it through to a successful exit.
Near Future Laboratory / Design Fiction
Originated and developed Design Fiction as an artifact-based way to make future conditions tangible enough to discuss and act on, influencing how organizations and designers think about the future.
Thought leadership — taking original thinking and turning it into a method that influences pedagogy, techniques, and ways of thinking.
TBD Catalog
Used the familiar language of a catalog to compress debate, surface assumptions, and explore adjacent possibilities through artifacts.
I help organizations make unclear futures legible using unique and immersive approaches so that they can debate, test, and act.
Applied Intelligence
A newspaper from an AI future that reframed strategic and policy conversations through a tangible, discussable artifact.
Shows how I clarify ambiguous technology shifts for leadership audiences without flattening the complexity.
SuperSeminar
A learning and development platform designed to cultivate shared language, creative confidence, and interdisciplinary thinking.
I've done senior-level mentoring, pedagogy, learning-and-development as well as capability-building.
General Seminar
A seminar format for structured inquiry, conversation, and collaborative learning around emerging ideas and cultural change.
Shows my facilitation depth and the ability to create environments where judgment develops, not just output.
Enterprise Workshops And Sprints
Worked with teams at large organizations to prototype futures, align around opportunity, and make unfamiliar options legible.
Makes clear that my workshop work is part of broader strategic leadership, not the whole story.
What I Do
I help teams give shape to things that are still too early, too ambiguous, or too unfamiliar for the normal process.
Sometimes that becomes a senior in-house role. Sometimes it is fractional leadership or advisory work. Sometimes it starts with a workshop, though the workshop is rarely the point.
The point is to make something concrete enough that a team can stop talking around it. That might take the form of a prototype, an artifact, a concept, a scenario, or just a better shared language. Whatever the form, the aim is the same: make the thing legible, tangible, and actionable.
Writing
Writing is part of the work: it shows how I think, what I notice, and the voice behind the projects.
Organizational Imagination / Speculative Prototyping
An in-progress book making the case for speculative prototyping as something teams can actually use rather than something that only shows up in occasional workshops.
Shows the current direction of the work and frames it in terms of how leaders and teams actually work, not just method.
The Manual of Design Fiction
A practical and canonical reference for design fiction and the use of artifacts to render futures tangible.
This book canonizes a practice I developed and evolved, starting as a premise in a <a href='https://nearfuturelaboratory.com/essays/2009/design-fiction-a-short-essay-on-design-science-fact-and-fiction/'>short essay</a> into a fully-fledged practice captured in this book. A demonstration of long-form authority in a field I helped define.
It’s Time To Imagine Harder
A concise statement of the imaginative and strategic posture that runs through the broader body of work.
Reinforces the strategic posture and cultural point of view behind the project work.
Near Future Laboratory
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.
This is the wider context around methods, practices, reflections, and insights inspired, motivated and sometimes confounded me. It is an always expanding resource that shows the depth and breadth of the work, and the long-term commitment to my various points of view and ways of working.
Who I Am
A senior practice built across engineering, founding, teaching, and long-form creative inquiry.
My background spans electrical engineering, human-computer interaction, history of consciousness, startup founding, advanced design, teaching, and long-running creative practice through Near Future Laboratory.
I’m drawn to problems that require technical fluency, narrative judgment, and the ability to help teams work on possibilities that do not yet fit the roadmap, the org chart, or the prevailing language of the business.
Education
Cornell University, University of Washington, UC Santa Cruz
Leadership
Near Future Laboratory, OMATA, Nokia Advanced Design
Teaching
USC School of Cinematic Arts, seminars, workshops, mentorship
Orientation
Creative R&D, strategy, product invention, organizational imagination