“Everyday intelligence?”
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.
Commissioned work and research practice
Near Future Laboratory helps teams make emerging futures tangible, observable, and ready to work with.
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'm excited to make new forms of “everyday intelligence” feel legible, meaningful, aligned, and useful in the world.
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.
Creative tools
New instruments for making-meaning — tools that support the representation of human imagination, creativity, not just tools for the automation of tasks.
Embodied and spatial computing
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.
Research orientation
AI futures need more than prediction. They need model worlds, artifacts, and ways to notice what ordinary planning misses.
Design fiction, anticipatory research, and speculative prototyping make possible AI behaviors, institutional effects, agentic interactions, and misalignments observable before they settle into everyday practice.
Socio-technical systems
Understand AI through institutions, incentives, rituals, interfaces, governance, and everyday use, not just model capability in isolation.
Speculative model worlds
Create small designed scenarios, artifacts, and prototypes for rehearsing unfamiliar behaviors, agentic interactions, and second-order consequences.
Failures of imagination
Surface unknowns, anxieties, hopes, and edge cases that conventional strategy, policy, or engineering processes often miss.
When to bring Near Future Laboratory in
A broad strategic question needs to become grounded and specific.
This kind of work is most useful when a leadership team needs more than inspiration and pretty mock-ups: that team also needs something tangible and relatable enough so that they can compare options, challenge assumptions, see and sense the expansiveness of the terrain, and make a decision with more confidence.
A product or innovation decision needs specific options
Use artifacts, prototypes, and design fictions to give leadership something specific to evaluate, compare, and discuss.
A strategic direction is still too vague and abstract
Make an emerging technology, market shift, or adjacent opportunity tangible enough for a team to align around and act on.
An active initiative needs sharper alignment to the strategy..and momentum
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
The work usually takes one of four forms.
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.
Artifact-led strategy engagements
Use catalogs, newspapers, props, documents, and other diegetic artifacts to make strategic options inspectable and discussable.
Prototype and concept commissions
Build functional and speculative prototypes that help a team learn faster, align more precisely, and test what should exist next.
Workshops for active programs
Design fiction workshops, sprints, and seminars tied to a real initiative rather than a one-off inspiration exercise.
Select talks and advisory work
Keynotes, executive sessions, and targeted advisory support when they advance a broader strategic or organizational effort.
Why this approach works
Humans are bad at acting on abstract futures, but good at responding to things they can touch, sense, and tangibly inspect.
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
See how this work has been used in practice.
Artifact-led strategy
TBD Catalog
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
“Tomorrow's News Today”
A newspaper artifact from an AI future that makes policy, model-behavior, and governance implications felt through familiar everyday media.
Prototyping and concept development
Speculative Prototyping
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
Ericsson AI Futures Workshop
A design-fiction sprint built to help participants move from abstract AI hype toward specific futures, artifacts, and judgments.
Keynotes and public talks
AIGA Design Fiction Keynote
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
Netflix Atlas Film Consulting
Proof that Near Future Laboratory can operate across strategic fiction, worldbuilding, production reality, and high-stakes collaboration.
Research through speculative prototyping
AI Prophetic Research Studio
An ongoing research studio using functional prototypes and speculative interfaces to explore agency, authorship, trust, collaboration, and human-AI interaction.
Entrepreneurial hardware experience
Prototyping the OMATA One
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
AI Policy and Governance Working Group
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
Recent notes and musings from the blog.
Most recent / Jun 08, 2026
Paul Verhoeven World Building in RoboCop
RoboCop is useful for Design Fiction because its world arrives through ordinary media forms: television news, commercials, public tone, product promises, and the vernacular visual culture people already know how to read. It's an approach Paul Verhoeven has used in many of his films, and it is a powerful way to build possible worlds that feel familiar enough to be thought about, argued with, and felt into. This note is a companion to the Near Future Laboratory newsletter Week 24 Year 26, which follows that thread through RoboCop, the OMATA Annual Report From The Future, AI stand-ins, AI farming, and an Office Hours conversation about neurodivergent futures of work.
Latest newsletter
Signals, notes, and dispatches from the weekly newsletter.
Most recent / Jun 10, 2026
NFL-DH-W24-Y26: Tomorrow's News Today
The latest insights explore the intersection of logistics, automation, and AI in shaping the future of work. It examines the role of human supervision in algorithm-driven tasks and the evolving legal landscape surrounding personal intelligence devices, highlighting their potential as witnesses in legal contexts. Speculative prototyping is emphasized as a method to understand the social implications of these technologies. Innovations like Scape's neurotinctures and the concept of "delivery stewards" are introduced, showcasing new job roles emerging from AI and automation. The newsletter also discusses the implications of AI stand-ins in corporate environments and features the KitchenAI CoffeeMate™ 6502, an advanced espresso machine that personalizes coffee brewing. Additionally, it promotes design fiction books and anticipatory research initiatives aimed at exploring future possibilities.
Latest podcast
Conversations around design, futures, culture, and technology.
Most recent / Dec 21, 2025
N°103 - Tom Guarriello The Meaning of Branded Objects
My friend Tom Guarriello joins me to unpack a deceptively simple question— why do some things matter more than others? How is it that “brands” are rarely just products. Tom describes how they’re meaning-machines: coffee cups, clothes, grocery aisles, and the everyday objects we carry through life are the things that quietly scaffold identity, aspiration, and sense of belonging. Choice arrives instantly; explanation comes later. Tom’s “meaning stack” helps us understand the rise of culture brands those brands that don’t just sell products, but stage worlds: concerts, exhibitions, lifestyles, and point-of-view. Tom's new book gets into all of this and more. Check out his " The Meaning of Branded Objects ". https://tomguarriello.com
Tomorrow's News Today
Strategy as Fiction & Anticipatory Research: translating emerging signals into speculative prototypes — news, products, reviews, and ads that help teams understand, communicate, and take action.
The Adjacency / Jun 02, 2026
Delivery Stewards Help Mitigate the Curbside Chaos of Autonomous Delivery
Autonomous delivery vehicles above certain size, route-density, delivery-volume, or curb-incident thresholds now require human delivery stewards, creating a new labor category around theft, liability, blocked sidewalks, and the practical social judgment automation still cannot supply.
These pop-up articles are speculative news artifacts: a way to make emerging conditions tangible enough to inspect, discuss, and act on.
If you'd like to talk
If this feels useful, let's talk about the work.
Let's connect and talk about the question or initiative that's on your mind, discuss rough timing, and what needs to become tangible.
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