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

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Featured Creative R&D

Products, interfaces, artifacts, cultural research, and publishing are all part of the creative R&D practice.

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A skateboarder riding in an empty backyard pool.

Empty Backyard Pools

Empty Backyard Pools is a photographic ethnography of Southern California skateboarding. It follows a small crew’s relationship to vacant backyard pools: private remnants of a housing crisis, desirable skate terrain, and places found through word of mouth, satellite imagery, and smartphone maps. I designed the book in the visual language of a National Park Service field guide which is an intentionally misplaced institutional form that contasts ironically with the gritty, guarded backyard pool skate culture. The book brings photography, cultural research, mapping practice, and publishing together as one method of representation.

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The PDPal Coat of Arms consisting of the PDPal character avatar with a squirrel sitting on its head

PDPal

PDPal is a series of public art projects for the Palm™ PDA, mobile phone and the web. It has pushed at the notion of mapping, attempting to transform your everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. PDPal engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments. In contrast to mapping projects that have utilized GPS and measurable cartography, PDPal has been anti-geographic and anti-cartesian, preferring to experiment with the construction of relative, emotionally based systems that ask what makes social or personal space.

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An animated GIF of the Vibewriter web edition interface, showcasing the interactive writing experience with AI.

Vibewriter Web Edition

Vibewriter is a speculative functional design fiction artifact developed within the AI and Designed Fictions Research Studio. It explores new paradigms of human-AI collaboration in creative writing by foregrounding interaction as a dynamic, improvisational dialogue rather than AI-driven content automation. Drawing inspiration from jazz improvisation’s “trading fours” tradition, Vibewriter fosters an interactive call-and-response writing practice that positions AI as a muse and creative partner, supporting writers in developing voice, flow, and creative presence through playful, timed writing exercises. This project rethinks AI writing tools as instruments of creative practice, rather than mere generators of finished prose, offering an alternative interface paradigm that balances generative potential with human agency.

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The World's Slowest Instant Messenger

Slow Messenger

Slow Messenger is a product from an adjacent now in which there is a mode of communication in which speed is not prized, but rather the semantic weight of time, patience, thoughtfulness has to be accounted for. The product is the product of, the result of, research into the implications of Instant Messenger® and instant communication.
What I was trying to explore with this project was the idea that slowing down was resonant, could lead to a deeper appreciation of the message itself. In a world where we are accustomed to instant responses, the Slow Messenger invites us to reconsider the value of waiting and the anticipation that comes with it.
That's it. Plus, it gave me a chance to dive into CAD, 3D printing, explore slightly more complicated electronics prototyping (including IMUs back when those were new) and do some physical computing with microcontrollers, etc.

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Illustrations of various curious rituals

Curious Rituals

This research project is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies (computers, mobile phones, sensors, robots, etc.). Gestures such as recalibrating your smartphone doing an horizontal 8 sign with your hand, the swiping of wallet with RFID cards in public transports, etc. These practices can be seen as the results of a co-construction between technical/physical constraints, contextual variables, designers intents and people’s understanding. We can see them as an intriguing focus of interest to envision the future of material culture.

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A looping sequence of the Social Alarm Clock device, Nokia Trust prototype hardware, and Nokia Trust breadboard electronics.

Social Alarm Clock

A 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.

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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.

Humbo

A working personal internet radio station developed through Nokia Design Strategic Projects in Los Angeles. Humbo used radio’s physical rituals—tuning, scanning, meter movement, and a channel—to explore personal broadcasting over a network.

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

Social Speaker

A speculative prototype developed as a working networked speaker for live listening with friends. Julian Bleecker led the strategic proposition, industrial and interaction design, functional hardware and software demonstration, and the various communications (presentation decks, tiny film) with a multi-site team through the Nokia Design Strategic Projects studio in Los Angeles, California. The project intent was to determine how social contexts and audio might intersect and influence the experience of connecting with and relating to others through shared listening experiences.

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About, availability, and contact

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.

Start a project conversationWays of engaging

What I Make

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.

Selected Work

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

Cover image of TBD Catalog

TBD Catalog

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

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A Newspaper from an Artificially Intelligent (Near) Future

This project is a Design Fiction artifact that imagines a world where artificial intelligence is mundane, woven seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. We used this as one of the prompts/provocations leading into a two-day workshop on AI policy, governance, and strategy. Through the newspaper we explored the implications of AI futures through speculative narratives and future artifacts. This was created over the course of a couple of weeks leading up to the workshop itself. Each artifact in the newspaper (e.g. advertisements, classified ads, news articles, etc.) was created to provoke and inspire the workshop participants to think about the implications of AI futures. Each was also an extrapolation of current trends in AI and machine learning, as well as a reflection of the broader societal, ethical, and policy implications of increasingly pervasive intelligent systems.

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Julian Bleecker working on the electronics for the OMATA One cylcing computer

Prototyping the OMATA One

Prototyping the Omata One in this early instance was a way to work through some of the ideas in hardware. I had a fairly clear idea of the functional requirements, but needed to work through them in a grounded way rather than just drawing boxes and arrow on sheets of paper. I'd descxribe this as a macro board representing the major subsystems tha twould need to be implemented. It gave me something to point at and say, "This is what I mean by the Omata One", and could feed directly into the engineering specifications. It was a way to work through the engineering requirements and get a better sense of the overall system. (This all from the perspective of engineering dept.; of course there are the brand aspects and such, but first you need a thing that does what it says it does — later you can make sure the character of it as a brand is right and consistent. But, if the thing doesn't work, then the brand is irrelevant.)

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Cover of the OMATA Annual Report from the Future

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.

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Amelia Brodka skateboarding in a grafitti'd backyard pool in Malibu, CA

Hello, Skater Girl

Hello, Skater Girl grew from a year spent with women skateboarders in Southern California. It records a scene that mainstream skate culture routinely overlooked, while taking seriously the particular work of gaining access, spending time, and becoming known as a photographer. The resulting book brings photography, cultural research, and independent publishing together as one form of representation.

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Default SEO Image for Near Future Laboratory

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 doing a Design Fiction project. In this case, I proposed a short design sprint spending half a day in a seminar setting discussing possible futures of the corner convenience store, which is on its own a wonderful container of hopes, fears, dreams, and desires of a culture. The objective was to develop insights through discussion and some light research in 1/2 a day and then quickly translate these into a list of things you might find in a corner convenience store — and then construct these as props we could use in making a few tiny films that could exhibit the artifacts and what they implied about future products one might find in a corner convenience store from some possible future.

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Car and Driverless a magazine from a possible autonomous vehicle future

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.

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Near Future Laboratory Work Kit of Design Fiction

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 3000 units over the years, with this particular edition being our most popular.

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Ways Of Working

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.

Research and Methods

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.

Selected Workshops

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

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 implications of change endemic to that topic.

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

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 and Governance Working Group participants envisioned products such as AI-powered HR managers, automated community mediators, and AI agents addressing social issues such as addiction and healthcare. These scenarios highlighted both opportunities and risks, from increased efficiency to the potential loss of meaningful human interaction and ethical concerns about corporate control.

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Atlassian Ascent Program Design Fiction Workshop

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 that would allow them to explore innovative solutions in a rapidly evolving technological landscape dominated by AI and other emerging technologies.

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Animated GIF of the LA Design Festival Workshop

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 more hopeful and inclusive future.
Participants left with a deeper understanding of the potential of Design Fiction as a tool for exploring and shaping the future.

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Selected Events

Gatherings, screenings, and public artifacts made with others.

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

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 consciousness in order to sense into more habitable futures.

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

Eno.

What happens when futures work intersects the grounded circuits of meaning and material culture and not just other futures workers or foresight ‘experts’? Gary Hustwit and 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 futurists who think getting a certificate in Foresight is good enough to call yourself one.

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Workshopping Design Fiction concepts from a possible product future

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, they explored emerging trends, examined their implications, and extrapolated these insights into a potential future. The outcome was a set of speculative artifacts that embodied this future in a tangible and thought-provoking form.

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Selected Keynotes

Speaking across design, emerging technology, and innovation.

A cover slide image for a Design Fiction keynote

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 imaginary objects to spark curiosity and conversations about possible futures; Examples like the Star Trek manual and Ikea catalog show how design fiction makes the future feel real and present; Design fiction exercises imagination and gets people thinking about the future consequences of new innovations; Organizations could use design fiction to explore strategic futures and prepare for coming societal and technological shifts.

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Presenting

Princeton Neuroscience Institute

I gave the 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 intelligence and neuroscience.

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Some Proof

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

Some Writing

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.

About, availability, and contact

If you have a creative R&D question, prototype, product, experience, or cultural translation brief, I would like to hear about it.

A useful first note includes the initiative, people involved, rough timing, and the form the work may need to take.

Discuss a creative R&D projectResumeNear Future Laboratory archive