Advanced Products · Applied Strategic Speculation

Julian Bleecker

Building the products, prototypes, and product worlds a company can hold, test, and examine.

An engineer, creative director, and founder who works by making. The practice turns an ambiguous shift — right now, AI — into strategic prototypes, product worlds, publications, and working systems a leadership team can hold and test. Founder of Near Future Laboratory and OMATA, where a product fiction became a manufactured, shipped, and sold GPS cycling computer.

Profile

Bleecker leads Advanced Products work: inventing what a company ships next, and running the strategic speculation that tests whether it should. "Product" points both ways here — hardware and software that reach real customers, and the product worlds, fictions, and prototypes that let a team see a market. The practice joins engineering, creative direction, software and agentic systems, CAD-informed hardware development, generative image and video, publishing, and world building under one method: build the thing, then work from what it teaches.

Advanced products Strategic prototyping Applied strategic speculation AI futures Design Fiction Build-to-learn R&D Agentic systems Product worlds

Current practice

Near Future Laboratory

Founder / 2005-present

An independent creative R&D practice for speculative strategy, AI futures, Design Fiction, product worlds, cultural research, publishing, workshops, and public-facing prototypes.

  • Builds strategic artifacts that let leadership teams, founders, designers, researchers, and clients examine an emerging market or technological shift through products, documents, interfaces, field guides, packaging, ads, receipts, publications, and small-run objects.
  • Created TBD Catalog, The Manual of Design Fiction, It's Time To Imagine Harder, The Adjacency, General Seminar, SuperSeminar, Office Hours, Imagine Harder, the Near Future Laboratory Podcast, and a long-running newsletter and community.
  • Runs hands-on workshops, executive sessions, editorial experiments, AI studies, and build-to-learn sprints for technology companies, cultural institutions, universities, civic organizations, and creative teams.

Operating proof

Editorial platform

The Adjacency

Fast, public-facing speculative dispatches and popup artifacts around AI futures, policy, markets, work, brands, and everyday life.

Community media system

Near Future Laboratory Podcast

Podcast, newsletter, Discord, office hours, and essays that keep a distributed creative practice in motion through conversation, publishing, and shared references.

Method

The Manual of Design Fiction

A practical reference for turning possible worlds into artifacts, prompts, briefs, workshops, products, and strategic material.

Point of view

It's Time To Imagine Harder

A concise argument for imagination as a practical capability for creative teams, leaders, institutions, and public culture.

Live format

Imagine Harder Summits

Small-format gatherings for practitioners, leaders, designers, researchers, and cultural workers around imagination, futures, and applied creative practice.

Product company

OMATA

Founded and led a hardware company through product vision, analog-digital interaction, app development, fundraising, manufacturing, brand, launch, support, and sale.

Current studies & R&D

Brands in autonomous futures

A current line of work on autonomous brands, agentic commerce, AI-operated operations, consumer-facing product worlds, and the strange public behavior of businesses mediated by agents, models, prompts, generated media, and automation.

Tito's Self-Owning Agentic Tamales

Microdrop / strategy game in development

An in-development microdrop and strategy game about a food truck, packaged tamales, catering, inventory, recipes, merchandise, and a brand system operated through agentic workflows. The project uses an everyday food business to examine autonomy, supply, local regulation, customer trust, operational improvisation, and AI-mediated brand behavior.

Harlan's Hauling and Heaving

Design Fiction microdrop

A Design Fiction advertisement for an autonomous cargo-and-garbage hauling service from a self-driving future, where moving "stuff" — from freight to the household dumpster — becomes both a consumer need and a commercial opportunity. The artifact uses a mundane municipal-services brand to make an autonomous-vehicle future specific enough to examine — the kind of grounded implication a research report can't surface.

BuzzBallz study

Speculative strategy study

A study using a ready-to-drink brand context to examine AI-generated campaign worlds, retail behavior, product invention, cultural texture, visual storytelling, and autonomous brand operations.

Functional AI writing instruments

Writing tools built as design fiction — software that compiles and runs, made to test how AI should sit beside a person's own voice as a collaborator and muse rather than a chatbot that answers for them.

Ghostwriter

Functional AI writing instrument

A working alternative to the chatbot that positions AI as a silent collaborator completing your thoughts in your own voice. Ghostwriter indexes a writer's own documents into a local vector store and offers style-aligned, in-line completions — a study in what AI feels like when it augments a voice instead of replacing it. Built with Tauri, Rust, and local or cloud models. Source: github.com/bleeckerj/ghostwriter-tauri.

VibeWriter

Functional prototype / writing game

A fork of Ghostwriter that pits the writer against the clock. A configurable countdown runs while you write; when it expires, the AI takes over and continues the thought — game mechanics that trade deliberation for momentum. Less pondering, more articulating: Pilates for the writer's brain.

Hands-on experience

OMATA

Founder / CTO / CEO / 2014-2021

Built a GPS-based analog cycling computer company from product fiction into manufactured reality. Led concept, founder narrative, industrial design coordination, mechanical and electrical engineering direction, app development, manufacturing, fundraising, photography, brand, customer care, marketing, logistics, and sale of the company.

Nokia Advanced Design

Creative Technology Lead / 2008-2014

Led creative technology work inside a global advanced design studio: future product visions, physical and digital prototypes, rapid manufacturing capacity, software and electrical implementation, product narratives, and cross-studio concept development.

University of Southern California

Assistant Professor / 2004-2008

Taught graduate courses in interactive media, mobile media, mobile games, and location-based systems at the School of Cinematic Arts while running a mobile lab focused on emerging forms of networked experience.

Earlier software and systems work

New York / Seattle / Los Angeles

Server engineering, mobile and wireless systems, IVR/VXML, SMS/WAP, PDA software, content systems, interface research, virtual reality, and human-interface research. A technical foundation that still shapes the way the studio works: ideas become systems, tools, prototypes, workflows, and artifacts.

Selected record

Education

B.S. Electrical Engineering, Cornell University. M.S. Engineering, University of Washington. Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz.

Public work

Books, essays, talks, workshops, patents, podcasts, newsletters, summits, AI futures newspapers, speculative artifacts, product-world studies, photography, and visual storytelling across commercial, civic, cultural, and academic contexts.

Selected clients and collaborators

Alphabet/ATAP, Amazon, Apple, BMW Designworks, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Dubai Future Foundation, Google, Harvard Graduate School of Design, IKEA, Logitech, Meta, Museum of the Future, Netflix, Princeton University, USC, Walmart, Warner Bros., and others.