Julian Bleecker, Ph.D. | Engineer, Designer, creative director, product builder, Founder
I use applied speculation to explore how technology, culture, institutions, and products change together.
I work across research, product design, creative direction, engineering, and publishing to make artifacts, prototypes, and adjacent worlds that can be experienced, examined, and discussed.
Applied speculation is the individual capability I bring to complex organizations and public questions. I create product prototypes, service concepts, quick-start guides, manuals, reviews, stories, and other artifacts that carry a world with them. They place technical capability among habits, social arrangements, aesthetic preferences, organizational life, and public imagination.
My background connects a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, where I studied with anthropologist James Clifford, historian of science Donna J. Haraway, and philosopher-activist Angela Y. Davis; graduate studies in human-computer interaction, engineering, and technology/culture research at the University of Washington; and an electrical engineering degree from Cornell with work in computer science and computer architecture.
My value is the combination: hands-on engineering literacy, product judgment, and deep cultural research. I work across what technology can do, how it is lived with, and the worlds it makes possible.
Applied Speculation
A practice of researching through artifacts, prototypes, public media, and other forms that bring an adjacent world into view.
Design fiction, anticipatory research, and speculative prototyping can make AI behaviors, institutional effects, agentic interactions, and misalignments observable before they settle into everyday practice.
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, 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.
Where It Works
For teams and institutions working through technological, cultural, and organizational change.
A new capability needs a form
A technological capability, cultural shift, or institutional condition needs to be explored through artifacts, products, interfaces, scenarios, or public media.
A product direction is still being discovered
A group has a set of signals, hunches, materials, and technical possibilities that need a richer form than a roadmap or presentation.
Different groups are imagining different worlds
People share familiar words while holding very different pictures of products, institutions, behaviors, and consequences.
AI is entering familiar settings
AI systems are becoming part of workplaces, creative practice, services, homes, and institutions, raising questions about agency, authorship, trust, coordination, and power.
A familiar format is missing
A question is difficult to hold in a brief, dashboard, or research report and needs a product, service, publication, institution, or other form of lived evidence.
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 hold it differently.
The wheels-on-luggage problem
Selected Work
Projects that show how applied speculation moves through products, organizations, public life, and culture.
The Adjacency
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.
TBD Catalog
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.
Applied Intelligence / Newspaper from an AI Future
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.
OMATA
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.
OMATA Annual Report from the Future
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.
Curious Rituals
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.
Corner Convenience
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.
Car and Driverless Magazine
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.
Quick Start Guide for a Self-Driving Car
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.
The Work Kit of Design Fiction
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.
Applied Speculation
With speculative artifacts, you and your team have something tangible that helps assess potential outcomes.
Outcome
Shared language
People have a more particular way to discuss the question, the artifacts around it, and the disagreements it holds.
Outcome
Situated implications
Consequences, dependencies, institutional arrangements, and everyday details become part of the work itself.
Outcome
A wider field
The question can be held through more than one product, service, policy, or public form.
Ways Of Working
Applied speculation can take the shape of an inquiry, an artifact program, a working session, or an embedded practice.
Each engagement starts with a live question and develops research, artifacts, prototypes, and other forms that carry its implications. The work may move through product, strategy, policy, communications, design, or organizational life.
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.
Organizational Context
Most useful where a company, institution, or field is taking shape around new technical and cultural conditions.
The strongest briefs name a live question: a new capability, product category, operating model, public concern, or institutional arrangement. The work gives that question form through artifacts, research, prototypes, and other situated materials.
Who are you?
You have a real mandate, there are real stakes, and there's enough authority to take action, launch an exploration, build prototypes, develop concepts for new initiatives, or influence strategic direction.
Relevant contexts include executive strategy, product and venture bets, AI governance, policy questions, strategic foresight, R&D, and senior advisory work where implications matter before implementation begins.
Proof
A practice built to connect technical grounding, tangible artifacts, executive judgment, and real operating responsibility.
Founder / operator proof
Built and sold OMATA
The strongest evidence that my judgment and ways of working reach beyond big ideas and concept. Very few “futures-oriented” talent can point to delivered products. I carried an uncertain product bet through product definition, software, hardware, brand, manufacturing, operations, and sale — doing so with a small budget, ad-hoc 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.
If you are evaluating whether this work can survive real constraints, start with OMATA. It began as an ambiguous product bet and required product, brand, engineering, manufacturing, operations, customer care, and ultimately the sale of the company.
Practice Profile
A cross-disciplinary practice spanning engineering, storytelling, foresight, strategy, product-building, publishing, and founder experience.
This can take the form of an advisory engagement, an embedded leadership role, a focused inquiry, or a larger artifact-led program. The common thread is applied speculation as a practical way of working.
Current Focus
Current work is centered on institutions trying to reason clearly before the future arrives as default behavior.
AI Policy & Governance
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.
Going Over Backwards
An in-progress book about building organizational imagination as a practical capability for perceiving unfamiliar possibilities before they fit the existing language of the institution.
It frames speculative prototyping as a disciplined way for teams to host uncertainty, test implications, and make better commitments.
Writing
Books and writing that codify the method behind the work.
Organizational Imagination / Speculative Prototyping
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
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
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
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.