Work

Selected work from across the domains that are of interest.

This is a range of projects and work — from photography to speculative design; from hardware to software; from short-term experiments to long-term research. If you're looking for someone with a diverse set of skills and experiences across multiple domains, and who knows how to travel across different fields and connect the dots between them, I'm available for commissions, consulting, and leadership roles.

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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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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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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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The OMATA iPhone simulator showing the ride dashboard beside Swift source code and live debug output in Xcode.

Building the OMATA Utility App

OMATA One depended on a utility app to pair, calibrate, configure, update, transfer rides, and connect to Strava. I had never shipped a commercial mobile app before. I taught myself what the product required and carried the app from early BLE experiments through TestFlight, Apple approval, and iTunes Connect, one unfamiliar problem at a time.

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