I use these speculative ads as prototypes because advertising is one of the more legible forms of future material culture.

An ad from a plausible future does more than describe a product or service. It shows what that future assumes people will want, what problems will feel urgent, what tradeoffs have become normal, and what kinds of stories organizations of all sorts will use to make those tradeoffs acceptable.

These are artifacts for thinking. They bring back the tone, aesthetics, promises, anxieties, and implied social contracts of a possible future, giving us a surface where assumptions become visible, consequences can be debated, and decisions can sharpen.

A speculative ad lets a team ask: if this existed, what would it mean? Who would it serve? What would it normalize? What would it obscure? What would we be committing to?

That is why I make them.

Here in the public newsletter, they are often more speculative fiction, sure. Entertainment.

But as an archetype of anticipatory strategy, they are incredibly powerful at turning abstract uncertainty into something people can react to, wonder about, create, argue with, and use to make better decisions.

If your team is working through an uncertain future, this kind of artifact can help guide decisions and make your proposition tangible and visible while your team is developing a shared understanding of the future you’re trying to create.

On Tuesday, May 5, 2026 (tomorrow!), I’ll join Jay Hasbrouck, Senior Staff Researcher at Google, for an EPIC Learning Week fireside chat about cultivating imagination as a practical organizational capability.

The conversation sits directly beside this issue’s argument: that teams need ways to keep unfamiliar possibilities visible long enough to make better strategic choices, especially when speed, tooling, and institutional habits pull every weak signal back toward the familiar.

We’ll talk about how researchers, designers, strategists, and engineers can make different kinds of thinking actionable without collapsing ambiguity too quickly.

The next Design Fiction Dispatch takes the question of AI provenance into the farmers market, where farms using “technology” — artificial intelligence, AI-based automation, farm management via machine learning — promise fewer crop failures, better climate resilience, and more precise decision-making, while “heritage” growers point out that algorithmic intervention can flatten flavor, weaken the ineffable “terroir” of everything including vineyard grapes, and basically obscure the human judgment behind food.

It’s a story about farming, and I chose that because it touches everyone. But the farming is also a metaphor that helps make sense of the way AI provenance may become meaningful across markets long before standards, labels, or policy & governance frameworks know what to do with it..which is basically where we are at now as regards AI in the terrain of creative practices.

The point is not to decide whether the future belongs to “Agentic Ag” or “Heritage Farming”. The more useful question is how to accept that fields fo human endeavor all always have preferences like this. Whether raw vs. pasteurized, or sparkling vs. still, or digital “film” vs. chemical film — understanding the trade-offs and comprehending that this is a tension that will be with us for a while is the first step toward making better decisions about how to position, talk about, and govern AI.

The work of speculative prototyping starts with understanding this point, then doing the hard work of making this legible in a compelling way so as to open up the discussions necessary to help inform decision making and point towards reasoned action.

That legibility is the point. It’s the difference between a vague sense that something is changing and a tangible thing that people can point at, argue with, pressure-test, and use as a better basis for strategic assessment. It’s the difference between a weak signal that can be easily lost and a concrete artifact that can be used to explore implications, make better decisions, and take more reasoned action.

Can you find the tension in this Design Fiction Dispatch? Look for the labelling, certifications representing policy choices, a food shopping habit, a trust signal, a piece of software indexing new kinds of machine-led automation, a new way of organizing human potential, a new basis for value, new kinds of jobs. They're all in here.

Most importantly — making the surface upon which all of this lies one of congenial acceptance of different preferences. When our stories index on unrest, distrust, and conflict, we miss the point that these tensions are not going to resolve into a single winner. They are going to coexist for a long time, and the sooner we can get used to that, the better.

Read as anticipatory research, the piece is a speculative prototype for a marketplace tension that may show up well beyond agriculture wherever AI becomes part of how things are made, described, trusted, and valued.