Date: June 22, 2026

Summary: This edition examines the interplay between craft and strategy, drawing on Henry Mintzberg's insights from his 1980s essay on the importance of integrating the craftsman's mind with hands-on work. It discusses how speculative design can enhance strategic planning by providing a tangible connection to future possibilities. The newsletter introduces a new speculative design newsletter that translates current signals into plausible futures, featuring ads and product reviews that blend forecasting with fiction. Additionally, it highlights a civic AI exhibition in Detroit, a case study on surveillance in local business, and archives of design fiction tools and catalogs that help teams envision future products. The Food For Thought section critiques remote work's impact on well-being and explores the phenomenon of "tasteslop" in social media, while also addressing automation safety through a quirky example involving Tesla's cabin camera.

Essentially: Integrating craft into strategy enhances understanding and planning for the future, making speculative design a vital tool for organizations.

But why? Organizations that embrace speculative design alongside traditional strategy will foster innovation and adaptability, allowing them to navigate complex futures more effectively.

studies + observations

“The craftsman’s mind is going constantly, in tandem with her hands. Yet large organizations try to separate the work of minds and hands. In so doing, they often sever the vital feedback link between the two.”

– Henry Mintzberg

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Mintzberg’s 1980s essay on craft and strategy is a useful way to think about how speculative design can augment strategy work. The craftswoman’s mind and hand are in constant feedback with each other, and this is a useful way to think about how strategy and speculation can work together. Plus — a new newsletter that arrives from your plausible future, a few items from the project archives, and wtf taste slop?

I forgot what call I was on last week where Harry Mintzberg was mentioned — my tableside notes are now a jumble of index cards. I dug out a 1980s essay of his that appeared in The Harvard Business Review in which he argues that craft should be an integral element of strategy work.

Mintzberg writes that the craftswoman's mind (he was using his wife's pottery avocation) works in tandem with their hands, and then that there is value in appreciating the unspoken feedback loop that circulates meaning, sensation, pressure, taste, and insight amongst the analytic mind and the sensing hands.

Of course I see this in the context of strategy augmented by a particular kind of speculation work.

Think of strategy as the (overly?) analytic mind of the organization trying to reason its way into a plan.

ANd think of the hand of craft as the kind of speculative design work that is doing the worldbuilding, the prototyping, the making, and the testing that gives strategy a more grounded, more tangible, more iterative way to understand the future it is trying to plan for.

The craftswoman's mind and hand are in constant feedback with each other, and this is a useful way to think about how strategy and speculation can work together.

This is why I'll refer to speculative design as the thing that augments the analytic, tabulated, indexed, and PowerPoint-y work that is often labeled as strategy. Speculative design gives strategy a way to feel the future, to get a sense of it, to have a more direct relationship with it. It is the hand that gives the mind something to work with, and in doing so, it gives the mind a more grounded way to understand the future it is trying to plan for.

Tomorrow's News Today

Prediction Products Overtake Lottery Tickets

Speculative design as news from The Adjacency

I started a newsletter a month or so back that is speculative design as news. You can subscribe here for four free issues, or become a Patron ($10/month! Cheap!) and get weekly dispatches of tomorrow's news, today. Each issue contains grounded, referenced items translating today's signals into a plausible quotidian tomorrow.

Each issue is meant to feel like it has come from a slightly adjacent, vaguely familiar world. There are ads, product reviews — all speculative in the sense that they are writerly extrapolations of the trends, signals, and research that is hinting at plausible near-future worlds.

This is a mode of speculative design that combines forecasting and worldbuilding with fiction. This is beyond scenarios and trend reports — it is an augmentation of these kinds of things, meant to be writerly, leaving space for opportunities to be discovered, and for the reader to imagine themselves in a world that is not yet here, but is coming.

If your organization finds its trends reports and analysis are a bit dry and PowerPoint-y, get in touch and let's discuss how I can make your research and signals more engaging, more speculative, and more useful for your teams.

And subscribe! The first four issues are on me, and the weekly dispatches are only $10/month.

The Adjacency dispatch / prediction markets at the checkout lane.

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Civic AI Play, Detroit, July 11-Sept. 20, 2026

An exhibition at MOCAD pairs an AI-guided civic conversation installation with a surveillance-themed tabletop game, using play and privacy-focused dialogue to ask who gets control in the city's data future.

AI-guided civic conversation and surveillance-themed play at MOCAD.

And yet, here we are.

They papered surveillance into the deal, and the restaurant didn’t notice until it was too late.

From of the lab Carl DiSalvo tells the story of a neighborhood restaurant that went ahead and took a local expansion loan, then learned the paperwork had provisions for some nefarious outfit called Flock Safety — a surveillance-camera company — to install cameras at the location. Carl wonders how accountability works when trad local business, investment, and surveillance infrastructure are all tangled up together.

A useful local-scale case about responsibility, funding, and surveillance systems that are difficult to trace.

TBD Catalog

The Design Fiction product catalog from a normal, ordinary, everyday possible product future.

From the lab archives: TBD Catalog is the canonical product catalog from a possible future, built from a 2012 workshop and later returned to print as a 10th anniversary edition. It remains a useful reference for how Design Fiction can turn trend analysis, research, and messy signals into a familiar artifact people can browse, compare, and question.

Project archive / Design Fiction, 2012-2023.

Visit TBD Catalog →

The Work Kit of Design Fiction

An illuminated physical toolkit for activating Design Fiction practice.

From the lab archives: The Work Kit of Design Fiction is a physical ideation card set developed from the same studio practice that produced TBD Catalog. Its cards give teams a playful, structured way to assemble possible products, services, scenarios, and everyday artifacts from future-adjacent worlds.

Project archive / Design Fiction toolkit, 2024.

Visit the Work Kit →

Food For Thought Section

From the digest-this-🥓 Channel

DEPARTMENT OF Work | shared by julian

Opinion | We Ran the Numbers. Remote Work Is Bad for Us.

A New York Times opinion piece uses data to connect remote work with weaker daily well-being, thinner workplace ties, and eroded routines. The useful provocation is about optimization: which parts of work should flex around people, and which parts depend on shared place, rhythm, and unplanned contact?

$ Read more →

From the digest-this-🥓 Channel

DEPARTMENT OF Culture | shared by julian

The rise of social media ‘tasteslop’

Emily Segal’s “tasteslop” names these kind of slick, recycled styles that spreads when platforms and AI flatten taste into repeatable signals. This “flattening of taste” itself has become a bit of a memetic conjugation, drawing together the banality of AI output — ironically, after everyone wrung their hands over the more expressive and wild halucinatory tendencies it once regularly emanated. I suppose this idiom — “taste slop” which sounds a bit like a ritual rather than a visual style — is useful as a kind of diagnostic: when something looks stylish, frictionless, and strangely empty, what has been stripped away?

From the nicolas-would-have-appreciated-this-🍷 Channel

DEPARTMENT OF Autonomy | shared by julian

Chinese Drivers Are Using Tiny Plastic Heads to Fool Tesla’s Autopilot

Tesla’s cabin camera is meant to verify that drivers are paying attention, and some owners in China are reportedly fooling it with small celebrity figurine heads mounted near the rearview mirror. It is a tiny object lesson in automation safety: every monitoring system creates a new surface for workaround culture.

Imagination is not a luxury. It’s an early-warning system for possibility.

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