Julian Bleecker | Designer, engineer, creative R&D partner

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

Creative R&D for emerging technology, product and brand experiences, trends and futures research, and strategy and governance assessment and exploration.

Portrait of Julian Bleecker

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

Bring a capability, product question, prototype, experience, or cultural R&D brief.

I work with creative and product leaders when an emerging capability needs a human form, a working prototype, a public artifact, or production support.

An embedded creative partner for emerging products, technologies, and experiences.

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.

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.

Some relevant work across creative technology, product design, and futures/applied speculation.

Cover image of TBD Catalog

Workshop · Product · 2012

TBD Catalog

What is 'the future', when 'the future' arrives as a printed junk mail catalog of yesterday's vision of the future?

Rendered view of the OMATA One cycling computer.

Product · 2014

omata

I founded and led OMATA from idea to exit, creating the OMATA One hybrid analog-digital cycling computer and directly contributing across first prototypes, industrial design, engineering architecture, iOS app development, manufacturing oversight, brand-building, and go-to-market execution.

A Printed Circuit Board with blue callouts

Product · Prototype · 2014

Prototyping the OMATA One

Hardware prototyping that carried the OMATA One from an early study through engineering, manufacturing, and product launch.

Manufactured product

Cover of the OMATA Annual Report from the Future

2020

OMATA Annual Report From The Future

A representation of a company using the Design Fiction archetype of an Annual Report as seen from its anticipated, speculated future based in the analytics and rational representations of the company's Financial Model.

White Social Speaker prototype against a neutral studio background, showing its perforated top grille and circular front control.

Nokia Design Strategic Projects · 2012

Social Speaker

A working networked speaker that explored live social listening with friends.

Archived project

Humbo Personal Radio Station working prototype on a workbench, with an N900, yellow battery pack, custom circuit board, blue tuning dial, switch assembly, and analog VU meter.

Nokia Design Strategic Projects · Speculative Prototype · 2011

Humbo

A working personal internet radio station for tuning through a live network of broadcasters.

Nokia Design Strategic Projects · Los Angeles · 2011

Default SEO Image for Near Future Laboratory

Workshop · 2012

Corner Convenience

I proposed a Design Fiction workshop and design sprint for Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination annual Emerge Festival. The goal was to provide an introduction to Design Fiction to attendees by actually…

Car and Driverless a magazine from a possible autonomous vehicle future

Product · 2022

Car and Driverless

A 72 page full-color Design Fiction magazine from an autonomous vehicle future based on internal strategic vision and roadmaps, industry focus, market analysis, and STEEP foresight research.

Near Future Laboratory Work Kit of Design Fiction

2024

The Work Kit of Design Fiction

Third (or fourth?) edition of a physical ideation card set developed originally to help facilitate the workshop that led to TBD Catalog. Designed, developed, and manufactured internally, the Work Kit of Design Fiction has sold over…

Making emerging possibilities tangible.

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.

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.

Futures research, anthropology, HCI, design fiction, policy, governance, and socio-technical inquiry inform the work.

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.

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.

Brand Experiences

Current focus | Artifact-led inquiry | Institutional consequences

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.

A few workshops across products, AI policy, and public futures practice.

These sessions bring together research, discussion, prompts, artifacts, and hands-on making around a live question.

Group photo of attendees at the 2024 Imagine Harder workshop

Workshop · 2024

Detroit Imagines Harder 2024

Detroit Imagines Harder was my 2024 edition of the ‘Imagine Harder’ series of workshops in which attendees collaborate to workshop around a hot topic using Design Fiction, and begin to construct an artifact that represents the…

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Attendees in a group photo at the AI Policy and Governance Working Group workshop

Workshop · 2024

AI Policy and Governance Working Group

Over two days in December, I facilitated a Design Fiction workshop to imagine futures with AI agents; the impact of this shift on society, and by implication, the need for innovative policy ideas. The AI Policy…

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Atlassian Ascent Program Design Fiction Workshop

Workshop · 2025

Atlassian Ascent Program

CDO Charlie Sutton at Atlassian asked me to provide a workshop for a three day event in which they hosted some of the organization's top performers. The purpose was to introduce an approach to creative ideation…

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Animated GIF of the LA Design Festival Workshop

Workshop · 2025

LA Design Festival

This workshop provided participants with the tools and frameworks to explore and create speculative Design Fictions for the future. Through hands-on activities and collaborative storytelling, participants were able to envision and prototype their ideas for a…

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Gatherings, screenings, and public artifacts made with others.

Attendees in front of the Affleck House, Bloomfield Hills Michigan, September

Event · 2023

Imagine Harder Summit 2023

A private event and summit at a Frank Lloyd Wright House outside of Detroit facilitated by Near Future Laboratory to engage creative leaders in discussions about collaborating, coordinating, and amplifying the value imagination and the creative…

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Movie theater marquee for the documentary Eno at the Brain Dead Studios

Event · 2024

Eno.

Gary, his generative documentary ‘Eno’, and Brian (Eno) are a kind of futurist of the best sort — they make the worlds they imagine and do so materially — and shape culture far more than the…

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Workshopping Design Fiction concepts from a possible product future

Event · 2012

TBD Catalog

TBD Catalog stands as the first and quintessential example of a Design Fiction project. It effectively navigated a full Design Fiction process, involving a diverse group of participants from multiple fields in a futures workshop. Together,…

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Speaking across design, emerging technology, and innovation.

A cover slide image for a Design Fiction keynote

Keynote · 2022

AIGA Design Fiction Keynote 2022

I was asked to deliver a Keynote presentation at the 2022 AIGA National Conference. The presentation was a discussion of Design Fiction and it's 'Why?'. Key takeaways from the presentation were: Design fiction uses prototypes and…

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Presenting

Keynote · 2023

Princeton Neuroscience Institute

A closing keynote presentation and helped facilitate a breakout group for a day long immersive seminar & conference on the intersections of virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligene and neuroscience.

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My practice is built across engineering, product, culture, research, and manufacturing/production.

Founder / operator proof

Built and sold OMATA

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 plus-plus: earned expertise at judgment, leadership, and product-building

Engineering degree work and hands-on product-building experience keep the speculative work grounded — connected to feasibility, constraints, systems, and implementation.

Research grounding

UCSC / UW / Cornell

A humanities Ph.D., graduate HCI and technology/culture research, and electrical/computer engineering foundations.

Method proof

Design fiction as applied speculation

A long-running artifact-led practice for making plausible futures tangible enough to inspect, debate, and act on.

Emerging-technology proof

AI, policy, governance

Current work focuses on making institutional, operational, and public consequences of AI tangible before they normalize.

Executive learning proof

Shared language under uncertainty

Teaching, seminars, and leadership sessions designed to improve judgment, alignment, and consequence-awareness rather than provide inspiration alone.

Applied speculationStrategic foresight made tangibleTechnology, culture, and product strategyAI policy and governanceSpeculative model worldsFailures of imaginationArtifact-led strategyTechnical feasibility and cultural meaning

Books and writing that capture the sensibility of my work, and represent my approach and methodologies.

Book titled "Going Over Backwards" on organizational imagination, against a yellow background.

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.

The Manual of Design Fiction book.

The Manual of Design Fiction

Book

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.

It’s Time To Imagine Harder book.

It’s Time To Imagine Harder

Book

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.

Near Future Laboratory

Archive

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.