PROMPT “AI is now ambient in the future or your organization. It’s as normal as butter on toast. It’s in planning, research, marcoms, product, analytics, hiring, and customer interactions. Nobody debates ‘should we use AI’ anymore. The question is: what kind of organization did that create?”

ACTIVITY Janky Time Machine Archeology: you can’t interview the future, you can only come back with evidence (labels, receipts, notices, quick-start guides, stickers, junk mail...fragments like this) that implies this ambient AI world.

STRUCTURE YOUR STRATEGIC FICTIONAL ARTIFACTBring somethign back from this world. Somethign that will help you and your organization think about the future you want to inhabit, rather than the future you feel rushed to implement. How do you avoid the pitfalls of thinking of AI as just a screwdriver rather than as a world-building contrivance?

Psst — General Seminar is the platform I created to use Design Fiction approaches to explore and discuss emerging societal-implicating technologies. It‘s got 4.8 stars according to the average of everyone who has attended over the last 6 Seasons!

Here are some top-line takeaways from the recent General Seminar S07/E01 session where we explored the future imagined by the AI 2027 Summary report through a “janky time machine archeology” exercise using the trusty old TrendPacks. The goal was to create tangible artifacts that embody the everyday realities of a world where AI is ambient and integrated into all aspects of organizational life. (We found prompt packs there!)

1) We treated the AI 2027 Summary (scenario takeaways + PDF + forecast tabs) as a creative constraint, not a prophecy, and asked: “what would make these claims feel normal, ordinary and everyday in the future imagined by the report (and by implication — it’s authors..because it was authored..)?

2) So, now it’s time for “janky time machine archeology”. Let's go into that possible future but — Rules: you can’t interview the future, you can only come back with evidence (labels, receipts, notices, quick-start guides, stickers, junk mail...fragments like this) that implies a world.

3) We used the Trend Pack Workbook (workbook frame for turning trend claims into personas/places + artifacts) as the structure so the imagination stayed grounded instead of drifting into macro hot-takes.

SOME ARTIFACTS WE FOUND AND BROUGHT BACK

4) One breakout group found two refrigerators: a neighborhood food-network fridge for “public virtue” (waste reduction + mutual aid) and a second “private guilty pleasures” fridge that stayed off the network when visibility felt invasive.

5) The tiny design move that said everything: an opt-in/opt-out button (or sticker) inside the fridge that signals how you want to participate in a food network. Cooperative care infrastructure where your neighbors can be alerted to food you have that they can use before it spoils? Or are you into the surveillance-capital data hoovering so Whole Foods knows what you eat? (Perhaps in exchange for free beer..)

6) Another breakout group landed in “Token Town,” a sweaty, stymie, yet earnest little corner store selling prompt starter packs where people buy stakes in policy-prompts before they’re submitted to a voting hub — ways to comprehend and engage with policy that you may or may not want enacted without just listening to bad political ads.

7) We pushed “prompts as durable civic infrastructure”: community organizers offload the tedious admin and policy wordsmithing to a reusable prompt kit so they can focus on community organizing and the things they are good at — which aren’t typically administrative crap.

8) The “expert section” twist: validated starter packs that let regular people level up fast (e.g., tenant/lease negotiation packs) so expertise becomes something you can pick up at the bodega and use immediately.

9) Another group came back with a bit of a darker artifact: a paper flyer with a microphone embedded that “listens” to public arguments about something provocative (like automating school lunch systems), forcing the question “heard vs listened to” and whether this is public-service mailbox vibes or omnipresent surveillance.

11) The paper flyer started out with this slightly ominous artifact with surveillance vibes. Part of the challenge of doing futures work in this algotocratic moment is that we slide quickly into this mode of tech=darkness. So I wanted to try the exercise of pushing back on that tendency and seeing if there was a bright line between being *listened to* and being *heard*. So, rather than covert extraction, I had the image of a typical public artifact: the humble mailbox..a kind of civic “inbox” where people intentionally leave a voice note, with clear consent and visibility into how it’s used. (Reminds me of 2005 and my VXML-based Tellbush.org project).

12) We wrapped on the point that the artifact isn’t the point: it’s evidence of a world, and the discussion around it is where strategy actually happens; next iteration includes exploring community-submitted trend packs (with some curation) and getting the workbook off-screen and into physical form.

Be sure to subscribe to the Luma nozzle where I let folks know about upcoming events like this: https://luma.com/nearfuturelaboratory

I read this probably 12 years ago or so upon the recommendation of Bruce Sterling. I remember the conversation but I don’t remember precisely led to him prompting the recommendation. Probably something about how circumstances that are unusual from one ontology are now just normal — as in having one’s world decimated or altered but to the generation that grows up with it it’s like..completely normal to the point where, in a world where the Golden Gate Bridge is not anything like that, but merely a lush, verdant path and place you walk to go somewhere else where there ar edifferent varieties of food..or whatever. (I seem to recall that moment somehow in the novel but I may have made that up. You know..it’s been probably 12 years ago or so.)

Hi! Welcome. Thanks for reading. In case you're new here and wondering -- I'm Julian Bleecker. I help leaders and strategy teams navigate uncertainty through strategic prototyping -- working backward from plausible near futures to make today's choices clearer.

I use an approach I pioneered called Design Fiction. You see some of it here in the newsletter and definitely over on my site over at Near Future Laboratory.

I create tangible artifacts and narrative experiences that turn abstract foresight into concrete strategic options, alignment, and action. My practice spans engineering (BSEE, MSEng/HCI) and the social sciences/humanities (PhD), so the work holds up technically and lands with cultural relevance and it's grounded and tangible.

Near Future Laboratory can bring decades of experience, expertise, and an extensive network of similarly talented professionals -- and I'm available for commissions, facilitated workshops, seminars, talks, embedded engagements, and leadership roles.

Another academic treatment/exploration/expedition into the meaning and cinematic jouissance of Spike Jonze‘ film “Her” — this time from JFS Digital by Aida M. Alakaam.
Here’s an excerpt:

“Design fiction is a design approach that allows designers to explore, reflect on, and critique potential futures through diegetic prototypes. The diegetic prototypes from the 2013 Design Fiction film Her are analyzed to demonstrate how Design Fiction can create and depict a near future world. A posthumanist perspective is applied to discuss the probable, possible and preferable interactions among the various agencies in a posthuman age. The argument is that Design Fiction can be used by multidisciplinary researchers as a productive and innovative methodology to conduct futurist research on the impact of technology on humanity.”

For those who don’t already know, Design Fiction opens the door to future worlds in this way, blending storytelling and tangible (diegetic) prototypes to let us question, imagine, and shape the impact of tomorrow’s technology today.
It uses something we’re all tuned into — storytelling — along with these speculative prototypes/diegetic prototypes. So a film like Her, done by a master visual storyteller, can help us picture and question how technology could shape our lives.

Practically — or more instrumentally thinking — Design Fiction has become a tool for designers, strategists, and researchers to reflect on possible futures and the choices we make today..particularly relevant as AI technologies rapidly evolve. The challenge is that these fictions can sometimes oversimplify complex issues — or become more like roadmaps for tech development rather than critical reflections on it. Also known as The Torment Nexus.

A coalition is pushing to create the Artist Corporation—a legal revolution for creatives—giving artists collective ownership, streamlined finances, and real power over their work, with Colorado leading the legislative charge.

No model tells the whole story, but the best ones help us navigate the chaos. George Box's timeless aphorism — “All models are wrong, but some are useful” — reminds us that while our models are always incomplete, they can be useful, just so long as we do not confuse the model with the world itself.

1) Sean Park shared four awesomely produced and considered Design Fictions he built for a university GenAI strategy retreat: “Adversarial Ethics” (students as red-teamers), “Sovereign Stack” (on-prem LLM infrastructure), “Faraday Classroom” (no-network “clean room” for human thought), and “Department of Romance” (keeping sociology afloat via AI romance). The move was to turn generalized anxiety into a concrete menu of experiments and tensions leaders can actually discuss.

2) A practical framing tweak landed: treat each fiction as an H3 “future-normal” end state, then backcast what H1 looks like today and what H2 transitional forms would plausibly appear next. That helps the room talk in moves and tests, not predictions.

3) The “permanent tutor” thread got linked to Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and its “Illustrated Primer” as a concrete pop-culture anchor for what personalized, always-on pedagogy could feel like. It also sharpened the question: tutor for whose values, and to what end?

4) Debate on Team Human vs Team AI for Design Fiction: AI can be a detail-expander and ingredient generator, but people worried it quietly outsources the thinking and makes curation the hard part. “Low-background literature” (vs low-background steel) was the metaphor for why provenance and “someone cared enough to make this” still matters.

5) A concrete “make chatbots more critical” reference was shared as a way to push against flattering compliance: Maggie Appleton’s “AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment”. The point wasn’t “less AI,” but better defaults that challenge you and force sharper questions.

6) Sandra demoed a pre-meeting synthesis workflow: everyone submits a ranked list of priorities, then semantic clustering plus Rank-Biased Overlap highlights alignment, factions, and outliers for the facilitator (RBO (rank similarity) paper). The promise: meetings where quieter signals don’t get steamrolled by whoever can talk the longest.

7) The caution was immediate: any “alignment surfacing” tool can become coercion, surveillance, or consensus theater if incentives and governance are wrong. That’s why “bring your values into the room” wasn’t treated as fluff, but as an explicit design requirement.

8) A related riff: instead of precomputing consensus, imagine an AI meeting-moderation agent that enforces airtime fairness, de-escalates dynamics, and only “unlocks the door” when the group genuinely converges (“Robot’s Rules of Order”). Fun as a conceit, but it forced the real question: who owns the agent, and who benefits?

9) “Context of control” was a clean ethics frame: a personal calorie tracker is one thing; a health insurer altering premiums from the same data is a totally different moral object, even if the UI looks identical. This kept the conversation grounded in power, not just model behavior.

10) Org culture and decision norms vary wildly, so any meeting intelligence needs knobs for culture, not a one-size “best practice” (leadership styles around the world; 2×2 decision-making by culture diagram). The subtext: “structurelessness” is still a structure, usually the worst kind (Jo Freeman on the tyranny of structurelessness).

11) Design fiction methods got broadened beyond static artifacts: diegetic prototypes and role-played worlds can make mechanisms felt in the room, not just read on a slide (diegetic prototypes in Her; “When Black Ships Bring the Future”). For prompt scaffolding, the dice-based Design Fiction d666 Engine was pointed to as a way to generate constraints before reaching for an LLM.

12) Institutional knowledge “as a product” surfaced via 99Ravens (hire experts, license their AI), which kicked off questions about ownership, billing, and whether co-op style models change the incentives. It looped back to governance who gets to “own” the synthetic voice of an organization?