The value of Design Fiction isn’t prediction. It’s a method for making the abstract tangible—a way to embody trends, hopes, and anxieties so they can be discussed, debated, and designed with, not just around. A prototype like MeWee Monitor doesn’t forecast; it makes meaning felt. Using Design Fiction within organizations allows teams to experiment with the future in the present much like the way R&D once explored new technologies before quarterly metrics eclipsed curiosity. It gives companies a safe way to ask what if when the usual tools can only ask what’s next.

Last week I was invited to sit on a panel about AI — surprise — at of all places, a local high school here in Los Angeles called Harvard-Westlake. It was part of an event they called NextGen where they bring in people from various fields to talk about what the future might hold.

Foresight done well isn’t prediction; it’s the discipline of noticing what others overlook, venturing into plausible futures, and returning with tangible proof such as artifacts, images, products, stories that teams can act on before momentum calcifies. This mindset “sees around corners”: it treats weak signals as invitations and turns them into options the organization can actually use. That’s the throughline in my work, from publishing “Hello, Skater Girl” the world's first photobook of woman skateboarders, to building my company OMATA, I treat weak signals as invitations and turn them into options others can actually use. Like Dick Fosbury going over the high bar backwards at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, this mindset challenges assumptions to unlock new perspectives, show optionality and possibility and hints of what could be. It’s attention, curiosity, and timely action that any organization needs integrated as a matter of its core practice in order to expand the strategic field of view and create practical optionality.

As generative AI continues to evolve, new camera technologies are emerging that allow users to capture images from anywhere in the world. Couple that with most everyone's experiences of disruption during the pandemic, the shit-show that airline travel has become, economic and social upheavals, and you can begin to sniff out weak signals of new forms of travel-like experience. Things like virtual travel experiences on Microsoft Flight Simulator, hours-long live streams of walking through cities (with an ASMR-like ambient audio of the bustle of the city streets), and many more. How might these technologies evolve further, enhancing the experiences with photo albums of places “visited”, 3D printed souvenirs, and more? How can the traditional travel industry adapt to these changes? What new forms of “experience” might emerge in this context? How will social norms around travel and destination experiences evolve in response to these technologies? This Design Fiction Dispatch explores the implications of these emerging technologies on the future of travel and...

I found an old video that some students made back in the day showing the 2nd edition of the Work Kit of Design Fiction in action. It's fun, simple, and makes good use of a Lazy Susan. The overall sensibility is that there are some basic mechanics to playing with the work kit, but no rules of play. Some people need structure and rules to get going, while a small number of people can just dive in and start playing without any rules at all. My belief is that developing a muscle to contend with open-ended play is vital for bulking up one's ability to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty, vital capabilities for strategic thinking, futuring, and just contending with the complexity and vagaries of life in general. The Work Kit was originally developed for the first TBD Catalog workshop and has gone through I think three editions, and at least one “fork” by Mateusz who made a Swedish edition. The...

I once overheard a poet say that “the primary purpose of poetry is to keep the primary vision of childhood alive into adulthood.” What I think this means is that poetry serves to keep the imaginative sense of wonder and possibility alive. Preserve the physical embodied perception of the world that children have before they are taught to see the world in more conventional, adult ways. Poetry, in this sense, is a way of maintaining that imaginative connection to the world and to ourselves. So what's that got to do with AI, anyway? Because, you know — I really want to know. Could it be that it is like this enticing, weird, eery new terrain that we don't yet understand, and poetry is a way of exploring it in a way that is not rational, ordered, or logical? And we need some of that non-rational, non-logical, non-ordred mechanisms for sense-making that revert us to a kind of childlike state of, variously, wonder,...

What is it about camera and the camera image that is so powerful that it keeps getting re-imagined and re-invented? Sascha Pohflepp's "Blind Camera" project from 2006 is a brilliant exploration of this question, and its relevance is more pronounced than ever in today's AI-driven world, particularly in the context of image generation and manipulation. Now today we have a Poetry Camera that prints poems of what it sees, and Matt Webb's Poem/1 delayed Kickstarter project that generates poems that rhyme the the time of day. These projects, like Pohflepp's Blind Camera, are examples of ways of casting our imaginative consciousness into new terrains of possibility — and doing so in a material way that is tangible and experiential. And they are specifically expeditionary because we never expect for these to become commercial products. They are provocations, explorations, and experiments that challenge our conventional understanding of what a camera is, what a poem is, and how we relate to images and text in...

Imagination isn’t a luxury or a personality trait — it is *Evolutionary Advantage*. It is the core of what Strategy is meant to be. It is at the root of Design. Without it, one will always find oneself left behind, unable to make sense of, or catch-up to the evolutionary cycles of change. This is a LinkedIn Live event on Wednesday, October 15th at 10am (UTC-7 / California) with Mark Tipping, Howard B Esbin, PhD, Damien Newman, and Brad Topliff for a LinkedIn Live event on this topic.

When considering how to facilitate strategic conversations about the future — and prototyping artifacts that can help one make sense of possibility — my approach is "Less Frameworks, More Fragments.". Put that on a tee-shirt? This approach emphasizes the use of tangible artifacts to provoke discussion and exploration of possible futures, rather than relying on traditional frameworks or consensus-building methods. By curating encounters with fragments that represent potential worlds, participants can engage more deeply with uncertainty and the texture of future scenarios.