In Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°279, Hala Auf a graduate design student from IED Barcelona where she is in their Design For Interaction And Extended Realities program, presented her speculative design thesis.

You can watch the full session here: Office Hours Side Projects Edition N°279.

Hala’s side project presentation asked what happens when we stop seeing everyday things — like cups and chairs — as passive objects, and start seeing them as verbs.

This isn’t about what these everyday things are, as products.

Rather, this is about what they do, as cultural agents.

Hala draws on a rich understanding of Object-Oriented Ontology. She showed how something as ordinary as a shared cup — the Brazilian mate cup — can bind a community, while something as ubiquitous as the mass-manufactured plastic chair we all have sat in, can flatten difference.

It was thoughtful, poetic, and deeply architectural.

It’s design as a kind of grammar and culture as its syntax.

Listening to Hala — and the discussion we had in Office Hours around her work — I kept thinking about my own past decade building OMATA — a speculative design idea that went beyond the evocative prototype to become a real product.

And now at the edge of its next step, I have to say that I think about what’s next for me.

What does ‘what’s next’ mean?

Building and leading a small, hands-on team whose role isn’t to ship features, but to prototype cultural possibilities; to ship possible futures, and to be expeditionary in order to prototype what sits just beyond the roadmap.

How did the last decade prepare me?

After a decade spent turning a speculative idea into a real product, that old practical question presents itself. Where does this belong?

What’s the next kind of organization or structure that can hold the kind of work I’ve been doing all along — the work of prototyping possibilities?

What I’ve learned is how to move from speculation to shipping. And by shipping I do not mean shipping just to follow a trend or chase a feature, but shipping to create a tangible experience of what a different future might feel like.

OMATA began as a thought experiment: I wondered, what would a cycling computer look like if it were designed for beauty, emotion, and the experience of being on a ride rather than the raw data?

Let me back up a bit.

Two days ago, at the end of a longish ride, a few cyclists and I were stopped at a traffic light in Santa Monica, California.

Just down from the mountains.

We weren’t riding together, but we had ridden a well-traveled familiar ride, just separately.

I was in my thoughts, somewhere. Probably thinking about this moment where my work as an engineer/designer/entrepreneur is at a comfortable, satisfying bookend.

While in thought, I overheard the fella next to me start bleeping through the data on his very beeep-y power meter, taking stock of its readings, and asking his friend what his meter was saying..and he then proceeded to analyze their disparate readings concluding that the effects of drafting, wind and all manner of other factors would explain the discrepencies. After all, they had ridden together, at about the same level of effort.

Not the way I wanted for my re-entry from dirt fire roads into the kinetic chaos of the streets of California.

It took much to not say something snarky like — “Yeah, but how do you feel?”

I said nothing. What’s would be the point? But the moment and my reflection on it was affirming in a different way which is this: I was specifically not contemplating data. The OMATA One sitting on my handlebars did the trick. I ride for the beautiful feeling of exhaustion and joy that comes from being outside, moving, and being in the world. I do not ride in order to determine how much power I exerted. This is the kind of world I wanted to inhabit before I started OMATA. A world where the experience of being on a ride was more important than the data about the ride.

In my mind, OMATA was the artifact — the product, brand, spirit — that would have come from such a world.

So..I made it.

It shipped. It was ridden by thousands of people. It meant something to them, and to me insofar as their affirmation of the value of this speculative designed object meant I was onto something real.

OMATA is, was, and (it seems!) will continue to be, in every sense, a piece of speculation made from real material. Speculative design — an artifact from a world that didn’t yet exist. But one I was able to conjure into existence. The fact that it became real, that it shipped and was ridden by thousands, remains proof that speculation can travel all the way from idea to industry.

I am an industrial designer in that sense. I make things that people can use. I ship them. I help them become part of the world. They just happen to be a kind of futures oriented industrial design.

So…what (now)?

Which brings me to this: so..what did I learn? And more importantly — why should you care?

That decade taught me what it means to build a company around an idea that didn’t fit any established category. It taught me how to translate imagination into operations — to build the processes, partnerships, and products that allow something improbable to exist in the world. That’s the kind of experience I want to bring back inside an organization.

The Case for Speculative Prototyping Teams

In my work — both through Near Future Laboratory and the many workshops, collaborations, workshops, summits, salons I’ve led — I’ve seen what happens when organizations make space for imagination.

They don’t just “innovate.” They learn to see themselves differently. They start to recognize that their roadmaps are cultural documents, not just engineering artifacts. They realize that design isn’t only about usability or aesthetics, but about how a company rehearses the future it wants to live in.

Most organizations have R&D for technology. Few have R&D for culture.

That’s the gap I want to help fill. Working with a tight, creative, hands-on team that works within a larger structure — not to chase features or trend lines, but to prototype cultural possibilities.

The mandate is simple: Explore what sits just beyond the roadmap. Make it tangible. Help the rest of the organization see, touch, and discuss what might otherwise remain invisible.

Why Now?

One of the experiences I missed after my cofounder suddenly and unexpectedly left me to carry the load of building and growing the brand and the business — let alone handle shipping, finding help for sales, and all the rest — was working with a team. Even today as I run a solo studio practice that I enjoy — I miss the energy, vitality, and even the friction that comes with leading a creative team.

Creating the conditions for a creative community through Near Future Laboratory, with things like General Seminar, Office Hours, Super Seminar and the podcast has been exceptionally gratifying and rewarding. But it’s not the same as the kind of continuity that comes from a well-supported team with the mandate to explore, imagine, and prototype, as well as the infrastructure around it to grow, make the work real, and have a common sense of purpose and mission.

This is how I see things: We’re at a moment where structure is optimized to the edge of exhaustion.

Everything is measurable, predictable, benchmarked.

And yet — despite all the dashboards and KPIs — we’re still hunting for that elusive creative muse.

In The Reader’s Guide to The Manual of Design Fiction, I wrote that imagination and structure are in constant negotiation. Structure wants control; imagination wants to play. When structure wins completely, the organization loses its ability to dream. Right now, the imbalance is clear.

Companies are great at execution and efficiency, but they are less adept at curiosity and facilitating the wandering explorations that start with wonder. They can maintain what exists, but they struggle to explore what doesn’t yet make sense.

That’s where speculative practice belongs — inside, not on the sidelines. It’s not a “20% time” perk or a hackathon. It’s an internal capability that keeps the organization future-literate.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I imagine a small team — five to eight people — hybrid by nature: part designers, part technologists, part visual and prose storytellers. People and assistive agents who can prototype ideas quickly and express them in cultural form: a magazine from a near future, a speculative annual report, an experimental interface, a provocation artifact that reframes how the company thinks about its work.

The output isn’t a deck. It’s evidence of imagination.

This team would work alongside product, brand, and strategy groups, creating conceptual gravity around the edges of the roadmap. Sometimes that means inspiring new initiatives. Other times it means revealing assumptions — showing what a decision implies about the world the company is creating.

Let’s call this Cultural R&D: A practice that blends the rigor of research with the freedom of speculation, producing artifacts that let people feel the future before they’re asked to live in it.

Why Me?

I’ve spent my career working between imagination and structure — as a designer, engineer, entrepreneur, and researcher. At OMATA, I led the translation of an idea into a functioning, beautiful object.

At Near Future Laboratory, I’ve helped organizations and teams you’ve heard about turn speculative concepts into tangible cultural artifacts (some of which remain confidential — but they’re out there!)

(You can get an idea of some of the projects — at least the ones I can share — in the projects section of the site, see the books I’ve written — and the topics I’ve explored on the Near Future Laboratory podcast.)

With the Imagine Harder Summits and the Near Future Laboratory Discord, I’ve built communities that treat imagination as practice, not pastime, bring thought leaders into a room to share their experiences and expertise - and through writing and speaking, I’ve explored how design, technology, and culture intersect in meaningful ways.

What connects all of that is a belief that imagination is infrastructure.

It’s not something you add when you have time; it’s the foundation for any organization that wants to remain meaningful in a world that changes faster than its processes.

I want to take that belief, along with twenty-plus years of creative and technical experience, and build a team that proves it — inside a company ready to explore what’s next.

So What’s Next

For me, it’s pretty clear: Bringing this kind of speculative, world-building practice inside a larger organization that can leverage both imagination and structure — and that understands the value of exploring before acting.

Building and leading a small, hands-on team whose role isn’t to ship features, but to ship possible futures.

To prototype meaning.

To explore what sits just beyond the roadmap.

That’s the work I want to do next.

And the work I’ve already spent my career preparing for.

Here’s the thing. Every company has a roadmap.

The real question is — who’s imagining the terrain just beyond it?

That’s where I want to be:

At the edge of structure.

Helping organizations make imagination a core competency, not a side effect.

Because the future isn’t something we predict.

It’s something we prototype.