How will the choices we make today shape who we become tomorrow? In this Dubai Future Horizons session, Julian Bleecker, Ph.D. and Professor John E. Katsos discuss identity, ethics, resilience, and the human capabilities we will need as part of the journey towards Dubai Future Forum 2026.

Join The Seminar for Near Future Lab - Futuring 2.0 on Saturday, June 27, 2026. Dr. Julian Bleecker and Dr. Becky Vartabedian will join Rick and Seminar attendees for short lectures, critical theory, philosophy, history, group discussion, beverages, snacks, and an adventure of very strange proportions.

Biennial of the Americas, MATTER, MCA Denver, and Sundance Film Festival present a special Denver premiere screening of BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions at the MCA Denver Holiday Theater, with a social hour, bookstore pop-up, and post-film conversation.

Why do organizations lose the capacity to imagine and recognize unfamiliar possibilities? In this EPIC People Learning Week fireside chat, Jay Hasbrouck and Julian Bleecker explored how researchers, designers, strategists, and engineers can help teams notice weak signals, work productively with AI, make speculative artifacts, and embed imagination inside real organizational practice.

The Future of Being Human: An HCI Symposium at MBZUAI was a gathering of researchers, artists, designers, and academics exploring the intersection of technology and humanity. Wondering and wandering into futures together in order to actively build a more human future, considering themes of AI and agency, embodiment and identity, ethics and values, and the role of design in shaping what it means to be human in a world increasingly mediated by technology.

I’ll be joining the Dubai Future Forum 2025 — the world’s largest gathering of futurists, policymakers, and creative thinkers — to speak on a panel titled “Relearning Imagination: Are We Actively Shaping Our Future?” In this session, I’ll explore why imagination is not a luxury or a side activity, but a strategic capability we urgently need to develop. Drawing from my work with Near Future Laboratory, I’ll share how I help organizations and communities build their own imagination practices — using Design Fiction, storytelling, and tangible prototypes to make possibility...

Annual studio reviews with several students from Liam Young's Entertainment & Media studio at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.

My second annual visit to Chapman University for Jillian Warren's course in Chapman's graphic design program. This year, I gave a talk on speculative design and design fiction and we had a fun workshop with Q&A discussing the role of speculation in visual design and communication.

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.

I gave a lecture at Stanford University's continuing education program in Mike Milley's course "Bus 132: Future Vision for Strategic Professionals." The lecture covered emerging technologies, societal trends, and strategic foresight to help professionals navigate future challenges and opportunities.

I recently spoke at Hyper Island’s Vision Week 2025 about AI, resilience, and what it means to be human in the loop. But the real topic was deeper: how do we preserve and strengthen imagination in a world flooded with automation? I told the Bill Bowerman story about joggers before jogging was a thing, of luggage before luggage had wheels, of futures imagined before they made sense. I didn't tell these stories to romanticize disruption, but to remind us that innovation often starts as a hunch that doesn’t quite compute. At...

Join me at the LA Design Festival for a hands-on introduction to futuring through Design Fiction. In this compact workshop, you'll explore how to prototype possible futures using artifacts rather than predictions. We’ll step beyond traditional storytelling to create tangible glimpses into what could be—using props, products, and everyday ephemera from worlds just around the corner. Come and stretch your imagination with us as we explore the near future in a playful, practical way. We'll be working in small groups on guided, hands-on exercises designed to spark imagination and make futures...

​Futurespaces and Near Future Laboratory bring you SideShow!
​One night. A room full of artists, designers, filmmakers, and creative people sharing the work they’re making outside the brief. Sound experiments. Illegible interfaces. Broken narratives. Tools bent into new shapes. Ideas with no client, no deadline, no plan—just the need to try something no one asked for. A rare glimpse into experimental ventures headed straight into unknown territory.
​Sideshow is a space for work that’s personal, unruly, and unfinished—kept alive in spite of economic pressure and the pull of everything more urgent. ...

General Seminar Season 06 is the sixth in a series of seminars that explore the intersection of design, technology, and culture. Each seminar features a different topic that lives at the vanguard of technological and social change. We look into territories that are not yet fully formed, understood, and which are begging for new epistemologies and ontologies — new ways of thinking, new forms of understanding, and new ways of being in the world. The seminars are open to the public and are designed to foster discussion and collaboration among participants. The...

An expert panel discussion on the evolving relationship between human agency and technology, exploring the implications of AI systems on society and the role of ethics, imagination, and policy in shaping viable futures. Held at The British Academy, London in collaboration with Google DeepMind, the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the AI Policy and Governance Working Group.
Moderated by Prof. Alonda Nelson, this expert panel will wander into the questions, hopes, fears, dreads, dreams, and desires of our...

Detroit Imagines Harder was my 2024 edition of the ‘Imagine Harder’ series of workshops in which attendees collaborate to workshop around a hot topic using Design Fiction, and begin to construct an artifact that represents the implications of change endemic to that topic.

What happens when futures work intersects the grounded circuits of meaning and material culture and not just other futures workers or foresight ‘experts’? Gary Hustwit and his generative documentary ‘Eno’, and Brian (Eno) are a kind of futurist of the best sort — they make the worlds they imagine and do so materially — and shape culture far more than the futurists who think getting a certificate in Foresight is good enough to call yourself one.

A private event and summit at a Frank Lloyd Wright House outside of Detroit facilitated by Near Future Laboratory to engage creative leaders in discussions about collaborating, coordinating, and amplifying the value imagination and the creative consciousness in order to sense into more habitable futures.

I was honored to be an invited presenter at the First International Conference on Anticipatory Systems, which took place 5-7 November 2015 in Trento, Italy. The conference explored anticipation as an emerging field across futures studies, design, governance, uncertainty, and complexity.

A series of discussions and presentations on the topic of Design Fiction, held at IDEO San Francisco on October 24th, 2013.

TBD Catalog stands as the first and quintessential example of a Design Fiction project. It effectively navigated a full Design Fiction process, involving a diverse group of participants from multiple fields in a futures workshop. Together, they explored emerging trends, examined their implications, and extrapolated these insights into a potential future. The outcome was a set of speculative artifacts that embodied this future in a tangible and thought-provoking form.