Commissioned work and research practice
Tomorrow's News Today
The Adjacency / Just In Time
Consumer preferences for produce used to pivot around organic processes, but now a new schism has emerged between farms that use artificial intelligence and growers that use heritage practices.
These pop-up articles are speculative news artifacts: a way to make emerging conditions tangible enough to inspect, discuss, and act on.
Near Future Laboratory works with organizations and executive teams on futures strategy, artifact-led prototyping, workshops tied to active initiatives, and select advisory engagements.
This work is most useful when innovation, policy, product, brand, and creative R&D teams need a better way to explore unfamiliar territory, evaluate adjacent possibilities, and move from abstraction toward evidence, shared language, and decision-grade insights.
Julian Bleecker brings a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, where he studied with anthropologist James Clifford, historian of science Donna J. Haraway, and philosopher-activist Angela Y. Davis; graduate studies in HCI engineering, STS, and socio-technical systems at the University of Washington; and electrical engineering and computer architecture studies at Cornell.
Imagination is your competitive advantage. I help you imagine harder.
WHAT EXCITES ME RIGHT NOW
I help emerging technologies find their human form.
Not just hardware as meaning-making apparatus, nor software as meaning-making contrivance; my work moves across domains through artifacts, interfaces, stories, rituals, prototypes, workshops, and built product fictions to make new technologies legible as culture and useful as experience.
Think of this as: AI as it enters normal, ordinary, everyday rituals, creative work, institutions, homes, devices, policy up and down the governance stack, and decision guidance.
New instruments for making-meaning — tools that support the representation of human imagination, creativity, not just tools for the automation of tasks.
Computational intelligence we hold, wear, hear, feel, and move through; embodying cognition and expression — not only software on a screen, or beter meeting summarization; new forms of everyday intelligence that are spatial, embodied, and relational.
NEW FEATURE — Tomorrow's News Today
The Adjacency / Soon
A reported fragment from towns and neighborhoods that are redesigning public space around human legibility, local knowledge, and deliberate resistance to autonomous-vehicle fluency.
Research orientation
Design fiction, anticipatory research, and speculative prototyping make possible AI behaviors, institutional effects, agentic interactions, and misalignments observable before they settle into everyday practice.
Understand AI through institutions, incentives, rituals, interfaces, governance, and everyday use, not just model capability in isolation.
Create small designed scenarios, artifacts, and prototypes for rehearsing unfamiliar behaviors, agentic interactions, and second-order consequences.
Surface unknowns, anxieties, hopes, and edge cases that conventional strategy, policy, or engineering processes often miss.
When to bring Near Future Laboratory in
This kind of work is most useful when leadership needs more than inspiration and pretty PowerPoint mock-ups: your team also needs something relatable enough so that you can move the conversation away from naive assumptions. You want to explore optionality, re-arrange assumptions, see and sense the expansiveness of the new terrains, and find the new language, practices, rituals, and purpose that lives there — and make a decision with more confidence.
Use artifacts, prototypes, and design fictions to give leadership something specific to evaluate, compare, and discuss.
Make an emerging technology, market shift, or adjacent opportunity tangible enough for a team to align around and act on.
Support a real program with workshops, prototypes, and advisory work that move the work forward rather than simply energize the room.
Proof
20+ years
Helping organizations make unfamiliar futures tangible enough to debate, test, and act on.
Clients include
Google, Apple, IKEA, Netflix, Samsung, Princeton, Amazon, DeepMind, Warner Bros., and more.
Outputs
Artifact-led strategy engagements, functional prototypes, design fictions, workshops, executive sessions, and advisory support.
Why hire NFL
Bring Near Future Laboratory in when you need futures work that can stand up to real constraints, scrutiny, and decisions, not just stage an inspiring talk.
Ways of working together
These are starting points, not rigid packages. A workshop can be part of the work, but the aim is always to give your team something tangible to inspect, discuss, and use.
Use catalogs, newspapers, props, documents, and other diegetic artifacts to make strategic options inspectable and discussable.
Use applied speculation to define and build functional prototypes that help a team learn faster, align more precisely, and test what should exist next.
Design fiction workshops, sprints, and seminars tied to a real initiative rather than a one-off inspiration exercise.
Keynotes, executive sessions, and targeted advisory support when they advance a broader strategic or organizational effort.
Why this approach works
Near Future Laboratory uses artifacts, prototypes, stories, and immersive formats to give teams something tangible to react to. When tomorrow becomes graspable today, the conversation changes. Different options appear. Better decisions become possible.
I ground the work in the constraints, details, and realities of a contingent world rather than keeping it at the level of abstraction. That makes it more useful for teams who need to make real decisions, not just have an inspiring conversation. It also makes it easier to integrate the work into existing processes, roadmaps, and initiatives rather than letting it sit apart as a one-off creative exercise.
That is the point behind design fiction here: not atmosphere for its own sake, but a disciplined research and strategy method for making emerging futures legible enough to work with.
Selected work
Artifact-led strategy
A catalog from the future used to compress debate, surface assumptions, and open adjacent possibilities beyond a slide deck.
Artifacts that make the future tangible
A newspaper artifact from an AI future that makes policy, model-behavior, and governance implications felt through familiar everyday media.
Prototyping and concept development
Prototype — physical, speculative, software, hardware — work that makes early ideas observable, testable, and legible before they settle into roadmaps or budgets.
Workshop for an active initiative
A design-fiction sprint built to help participants move from abstract AI hype toward specific futures, artifacts, and judgments.
Keynotes and public talks
A public-facing talk that shows the voice of the practice, but also signals the deeper strategic and pedagogical work behind it.
Range and execution
Proof that Near Future Laboratory can operate across strategic fiction, worldbuilding, production reality, and high-stakes collaboration.
Research through appied speculation and functional prototyping
An ongoing research studio using applied speculation and functional prototypes to explore agency, authorship, trust, collaboration, and new forms of human-AI interaction.
Entrepreneurial hardware experience
I founded OMATA in 2015, built the OMATA One from prototype to manufactured hardware product, led across product, engineering, brand, manufacturing, firmware and iOS software (my first retail iOS app), wrote and submitted the core IP patent for the company (US utility patent) then sold the company in 2022.
AI policy and governance
I facilitated a working session in AI policy and governance using speculative artifacts to examine delegated authority, institutional trust, accountability, AI agents, and governance questions before defaults form.
Latest writing
Most recent / Aug 01, 2026
I recently gave an interview for Futures Thinking: Using a Multidisciplinary Approach. I talk about the possibilities of futures work, the value of stories and future artefacts, the bewildering arrival of large language models, and the social practice of imagining alongside other people. I've included the book description from the back cover for context.
Latest newsletter
Most recent / Aug 03, 2026
W32-Y26
Is law the first applied futurism? This concept emerged during a recent Office Hours discussion, highlighting the role of lawyers as early futurists who shape imagined futures through legal frameworks. The newsletter examines how law transforms possibilities into enforceable codes, creating a duality in the future that is both open to interpretation and constrained by written regulations. It also explores the implications of this perspective on futurism, suggesting that lawyers engage in applied speculation with tangible outcomes. Additionally, it features insights on the Tektronix Turing Clamp 6502 MkII, job opportunities at the Office of Applied Speculation, and a new book on Futures Thinking that integrates social research and participatory design. Other highlights include Tim O’Brien’s blog on AI and labor, William Fisk’s hyperrealistic art, and a discussion on Gen Z's skepticism towards AI, emphasizing the need for policy over PR to build trust. The newsletter also covers design futures, including...
Latest podcast
Most recent / Jul 07, 2026
In this episode of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast, I talk with my old friend Ian Bogost about his new book, “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life” — a funny (like..I laughed out loud) , generous, and quietly radical invitation to recover the sensory enchantment of everyday life.Ian’s book begins with ordinary things: stick shifts, toasters, paper cups, plastic film, doorknobs, faucets, pre-ordering shirts, Diet Coke cans, plunger force cups when they are missing their handle, the texture of a phone case, the sound of ice in a motel ice bucket. Of course our conversation quickly opens into something larger, which I think Ian has been asking for awhile: how modern life has dematerialized so many of our encounters with the world, replacing small tactile gratifications with convenience, automation, frictionless interfaces, and screens.What I especially loved about this conversation is that Ian is not making a...
If you'd like to talk
Let's connect and talk about the question or initiative that's on your mind, discuss rough timing, and what needs to become tangible.