A selected archive of prototypes, products, artifacts, experiences, workshops, talks, and research projects from Near Future Laboratory.
Warner Bros. · Wizarding World · with Google ATAP · 2018–2019
A working, screenless, buttonless Wizarding World wand for Warner Bros. that reads spells from motion gestures alone, with very few false positives, made with Google ATAP's Direct Objects team. It carries only a Jacquard-class gyro and accelerometer, but manages to recognize nearly 300 spells from the canonical Wizarding World spellbook.
Archived project
Narrative · Storytelling · Brand Design · 2015
I founded OMATA around an desire to make a product from 0 to 100. THis idea appealed to me because it ran counter to the archetype of a sports computer — analog on the outside; digital on the inside. An instrument for cycling enthusiasts. I orchestrated the work of a small team that defined the contours of the brand. Later I continued to evolve the work on things, creating the assets, managing social, newsletters, the books, films, photography, packaging, and the app. The Brand Books were at the heart of the record, with several revisions to evolve the story. The Ambassador Books guided riders' photographs and posts; the Press Books gathered the product story and helped anchor the public comms. Here I've gathered most of it, including the films, fonts, photography, product imagery, merch and the evolving identity system.
Cultural Research · Photography
Empty Backyard Pools is a photographic ethnography of Southern California skateboarding. It follows a small crew’s relationship to vacant backyard pools: private remnants of a housing crisis, desirable skate terrain, and places found through word of mouth, satellite imagery, and smartphone maps. I designed the book in the visual language of a National Park Service field guide which is an intentionally misplaced institutional form that contasts ironically with the gritty, guarded backyard pool skate culture. The book brings photography, cultural research, mapping practice, and publishing together as one method of representation.
Second printing, June 2021
Nokia Design Strategic Projects · Applied Speculation · 2010–2011
Heads Up explored how mobile tasks could be performed through glanceable visual, audio, voice, and physical interaction while a person remained engaged with the world around them.
Archived project
Experience · Prototype · 2025
A paired pager experience for A24's One Battle After Another: two vintage-style Motorola Pageboy III pagers synchronize and play a unique two-part composition when they are near one another. This experience was designed to explore the interaction between proximity and sound in a tangible, collectible format — while also tying A24's exceptional merchandise program to the film experience.
Working prototype
Product · Prototype · Research · 2016
OMATA One depended on a utility app to pair, calibrate, configure, update, transfer rides, and connect to Strava. I had never shipped a commercial mobile app before. I taught myself what the product required and carried the app from early BLE experiments through TestFlight, Apple approval, and iTunes Connect, one unfamiliar problem at a time.
Artifact · Workshop · 2024
A newspaper artifact that lets a policy and governance working group examine AI through familiar everyday media.
Public artifact
Nokia Design Strategic Projects · Applied Speculation · 2011
A working bedside clock that isolated waking behaviors from phone OS constraints, letting us study sound, gesture, and physical presence. Those explorations informed a proposal for Nokia's MeeGo alarm UI/UX.
Archived project
Research · Prototype · 2025
An ongoing research studio using applied speculation and functional prototypes to examine agency, authorship, trust, and human-AI interaction.
Ongoing research studio
Product · Prototype · 2014
Hardware prototyping that carried the OMATA One from an early study through engineering, manufacturing, and product launch. This macroboard was done “in house” (literally..in my house) and provided the basis for hardware specification for the commissioned engineering team so as to guide the development of the final product (cost) efficiently.
Manufactured product
Prototype · 2025
Vibewriter is a speculative functional design fiction artifact developed within the AI and Designed Fictions Research Studio. It explores new paradigms of human-AI collaboration in creative writing by foregrounding interaction as a dynamic, improvisational dialogue rather than AI-driven content automation. Drawing inspiration from jazz improvisation’s “trading fours” tradition, Vibewriter fosters an interactive call-and-response writing practice that positions AI as a muse and creative partner, supporting writers in developing voice, flow, and creative presence through playful, timed writing exercises. This project rethinks AI writing tools as instruments of creative practice, rather than mere generators of finished prose, offering an alternative interface paradigm that balances generative potential with human agency.
2025
A program to help me manage the 80,000+ images I have from my OMATA One project. It uses machine learning to analyze and categorize images based on semantics and heuristics, making it easier to find and utilize specific images within the dataset. Developed in collaboration with Github Copilot, it creates a sparse GIF animation for sequences of images (and videos), and generates a well-structured JSON data file with paths to all of the images for easy reference.
Prototype · 2025
VibeWriter is a Near Future Laboratory Design Fiction Project Sprint that evolved from the Ghostwriter project focussed specifically on an action-oriented writing instrument where there were varied game mechanics associated with the writing in a way that facilitated less pondering and more articulating of ideas in text. A bit like a surrealist tablet that encouraged stream of consciousness and just getting ideas out on "the page"'
VibeWriter is a bit of a 'Fork' of the main Ghostwriter code base that pits the human and its AI partner against the clock.
When the clock runs down, the AI partner is there to help you finish your thought, or at least get you to the next sentence.
Prototype · 2024
Ghostwriter. It is a writing companion, not a chatbot.
A writing companion that behaves like a muse. It uses your own words as context, retrieving semantically similar fragments from your personal archive and offering stylistically aligned completions.
Rather than a chat interface, Ghostwriter is a silent collaborator—an augment to your voice, not a surrogate. It repositions AI as a tool for creative alignment and memory-based retrieval, mimicking cognitive support more than conversation. This shift counters the growing tendency to replace human interaction with chat-based automation, while surfacing deeper forms of creative alignment and memory-based retrieval that mimic cognitive support more than conversation.
Product · 2024
An online/digital version of the analog card set used by Design Fiction professionals worldwide. Rather than physical cards, this is a browser-based interactive version that allows users to shuffle and draw cards from the various decks: Attributes, Actions, Objects, Archetypes, and Extras. Each card is represented with high-quality images of the original cards, maintaining the visual appeal of the physical set. Users can explore different combinations of cards to inspire their design fiction projects, just like they would with the physical kit. This online edition makes the Work Kit of Design Fiction accessible to a broader audience, allowing designers and storytellers around the world to utilize this creative tool in their work.
Workshop · 2024
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. In collaboration with my friends Cezanne Charles and John Marshall of Root of Two, I organized this workshop in Detroit October 16-18 2024 at The Jam Handy venue in Detroit. We took as our brief to articulate our perspectives on the future of work by representing our informed insights, professional intutitions, and experienced imaginations in the form of something that we'd look at today as a kind of ‘Employee Manual.’
Talk · 2024
We collaborated with Brain Dead and Gary Hustwit to bring “Eno” to Los Angeles audiences. “Eno” is a film that’s different every time it’s shown. The film taps into an over 60-year tradition of “generative art” of which Eno himself is part. Drawing from a database of 30 hours of new interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from Eno's personal archive, a system of rules set down in code by Hustwit and artist-programmer Brendan Dawes results in a different film algorithmically generated for each viewing.
2024
I facilitated a workshop for Hyper Island Vision Week in which the design brief (a 24 hour sprint) was to create a podcast from the future' — a Design Fiction conceit in which students imagine into a future world and represent the contours of that world through a humble podcast that has been brought back from the future. 91 Podcasts in 24 Hours were created, a few of which are summarized below.
Workshop · 2024
We helped Tech Concept Lab organize and facilitate a 24 hour Design Fiction + AI Design Sprint. This was done remotely between Venice Beach 🛹 California and Karlskrona 🏂🏽 Sweden. The objective was to expose students to the mechanics of ideation, innovation, and imagination through Design Fiction. For my participation, I presented a 'Design Fiction 101' overview with some examples of past projects. There was some Q&A from the audience and then they engaged in their sprint. I joined some of the groups for more focussed discussion and review of their projects before they presented to judges.
Workshop · Talk · 2024
It's Time To Imagine Harder: Bringing Imagination and Innovation Back Together Again
2024
Third (or fourth?) edition of a physical ideation card set developed originally to help facilitate the workshop that led to TBD Catalog. Designed, developed, and manufactured internally, the Work Kit of Design Fiction has sold over 3000 units over the years, with this particular edition being our most popular.
Talk · 2024
It’s time to imagine harder. Join us for a hands-on deep dive into new imagination infrastructures to tackle the hardest design challenges. Visit lessons learned from prototyping new products like the Hololens, Apple Vision Pro, new urban communities, and artifacts from the future. Be ready to challenge the panelists, MadLibs style, and join in the process to explore new impossible futures.
Prototype · 2024
A project that combines poetry, Python programming, and AI-generated voice synthesis. The project explores the intersection of technology and creativity, showcasing how AI can be used to create unique and engaging experiences.
2024
Causal Islands is about bringing together experts and enthusiasts from many different backgrounds and sharing and learning together. We are creative technologists, researchers, and builders, exploring what the future of computing can be. The LA community edition on Saturday, March 23rd, 2024 has themes of building and running networks together, exploring the future through creativity and poetics of computing, tools for thought and other interfaces for human knowledge, emerging and rethinking social networks, generative AI as a humane tool for people, and the journey of building a more distributed web.
Workshop · 2023
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.
Workshop · 2023
What is television in a world of AI? What does it look like? How is it experienced? What are possible integrations across "channels"?
armasuisse · 2023
A soldier's service booklet, with new duties for water, energy, networks, and civilian life.
2023
The Work Kit of Design Fiction comes from a long line of ideation-style prompt cards — a whole sub-culture unto its own. I've created four editions of this since the very first one created in the summer of 2012 for the TBD Catalog workshop in Detroit. I made this as I was intrigued by the possibilities of generating thought-provoking and potentially preposterous concepts for products that would have to fill what would become TBD Catalog. The fun I felt about creating a generative idea generating tool was too much to ignore. It was so popular that I created 3 additional 'editions' of The Work Kit.
Talk · 2022
Bloomberg & Hyundai's Art+Technology: Emerging Dialogues with host Gemma Cairney is where we meet a diverse lineup of artists, technologists and futurists to share ideas and embark upon conversations that will redefine our world.\nHow can we predict the consumer trends of the future? By creating them ourselves! According to artists and 'total punks' Julian Bleecker and Liam Young, having a sense of hope and possibility is the most rebellious thing we can do now. By actively imagining, designing, and even prototyping future objects and narratives, we can begin to create the future we want. Learn more about 'Design Fiction' in the latest episode of Art+Technology.
Talk · 2022
I was asked to deliver a Keynote presentation at the 2022 AIGA National Conference. The presentation was a discussion of Design Fiction and it's 'Why?'. Key takeaways from the presentation were: Design fiction uses prototypes and imaginary objects to spark curiosity and conversations about possible futures; Examples like the Star Trek manual and Ikea catalog show how design fiction makes the future feel real and present; Design fiction exercises imagination and gets people thinking about the future consequences of new innovations; Organizations could use design fiction to explore strategic futures and prepare for coming societal and technological shifts.
2022
With 36 hours notice, the Near Future Laboratory put together a proposal for a art+technology-style residency program. NFL was exploring what Solarpunk was, alongside of some of Solarpunk's thought-leadership. We decided to quickly respond to the RFP by proposing that we worldbuild in public, creating translations of the Solarpunk values and sensibilities translated into artifacts like a catalog of Solarpunk supplies, articles about the happenings in the Solarpunk world, and so forth. We also proposed public workshops for young adults on futuring and worldbuilding.
Talk · 2022
Netflix Future Of is a fun, light, entertaining show asking about the future of everything from gaming and dating, to life after death. I participated as a talking head futures expert. They did spring the dating topic on me though, for which I cannot claim much notable expertise. Pure entertainment. Fun to talk and chat and see what comes out in the edit.
Research · 2022
Futures Design / Technical Consultant for Hollywood
Product · Experience · 2022
ADM, a global leader in the agribusiness sector, was looking for ways to showcase their research and development in low-carbon impact food science. ADM's Marketing & Communications Team partnered with Near Future Laboratory to conduct a comprehensive interview series with their Chief Scientists and a team of food science experts so as to imagine ways to translate their analytic work into some forms that would be grounded, legible, and relatable to the general public.
Product · 2022
A 72 page full-color Design Fiction magazine from an autonomous vehicle future based on internal strategic vision and roadmaps, industry focus, market analysis, and STEEP foresight research.
Workshop · 2021
An internal workshop that presented the value of Design Fiction for creative practice. It was conducted for the benefit of a design and creative team at Apple that desired to integrate Design Fiction and speculative practices into its toolbox of approaches and methodologies. The workshop consisted of lecture, discussion, Q&A and hands-on activities.
2021
What does Life at Home look like when a world that's been on lockdown imagines what it wants? We translated the data from the world's most extensive in-home ethnographic research and imagined that world if it were pages from an IKEA catalog.
Workshop · 2021
General Seminar is a multi-season seminar and workshop series I created, designed, produced, and facilitated through Near Future Laboratory. Each 90-minute session brought a small group together around a timely question, using curated material, focused exercises, and guided discussion to explore possible futures. By February 2026, I had hosted 50 sessions.
2020
Near Future Laboratory Podcast brings you conversations at the vanguard of design, technology, futures, and culture, hosted by Julian Bleecker, founder of the Near Future Laboratory.
2020
A representation of a company using the Design Fiction archetype of an Annual Report as seen from its anticipated, speculated future based in the analytics and rational representations of the company's Financial Model.
Warner Bros. Consumer Products · 2019–2020
Technical and creative advisory for an early connected Wizarding World wand.
Archived project
Workshop · 2019
What do socially-powered possibilities look like in 10 years? What will social media will look like in 10 years? What will the social interactions look like and feel like?\n The goal of this project is to help us envision more concretely how ‘social’ will show up in people’s lives in 10 years and what will it mean to provide socially-powered possibilities to the world.
Workshop · 2019
A very short format 4 hour Design Fiction workshop consisting of a "Design Fiction 101" presentation, discussion with Q&A, and hands-on workshop activities.
2019
The approach of Design Fiction involves producing a prospective scenario and materializing it as an everyday object, comprehensible and accessible to everyone, to spark situated discussions on societal issues such as technological change.
The objective of this mandate will be to create a plausible map of the City of Geneva designed for autonomous vehicles, which will facilitate discussion on the urban implications of such a deployment.
The proposed output will be a printed map in the form of a city map of Geneva that has come from this autonomous vehicle future
Talk · 2018
Primer is (was?) the organization developed to establish Speculative Design as a formal practice. Their annual conference and community has been (was?) a thriving locus of conversation and discussion. I help organize and run the Los Angeles chapter until the pandemic approached (and I was also asked to pay a fee to use the brand.)
Workshop · Autonomous Vehicles · 2015
Imagining a future of self-driving cars using the humble quick-start guide as a container of the implications and contingencies of the autonomous way of life.
Workshop · 2015
A keynote presentation to the main audience and hands-on workshop for a group of Google office's creative practitioners during a summit of creative technology leadership and practitioners at Google's offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Workshop · 2015
A workshop that wanders into the Future of Domesticity and asks: What might domestic home life look like in some possible near future if our evidence of this was in the form of the iconic IKEA product catalog?
Product · 2014
I founded and led OMATA from idea to exit, creating the OMATA One hybrid analog-digital cycling computer and directly contributing across first prototypes, industrial design, engineering architecture, iOS app development, manufacturing oversight, brand-building, and go-to-market execution.
2014
I developed OMATA's character, voice, and visual sensibility through photography, 3D rendering, animation, and social media. The work brought product design, image-making, and writing together in the daily communications of a brand I founded and led.
Workshop · 2014
A Newspaper from a possible future of sports! How did we get this? Well, we got into the Near Future Laboratory's new used, slightly wobbily time machine and went to a possible future of sports. Found ourselves at an Off Track Betting Parlor, in a back alley with a gruff bookie, watching degenerates pull their hair out yelling at the crooked dog race trainers, and pondering who has the better algorithmic assistant for prognosticating the outcomes of the World Cup — and we brought back a newspaper.
Winning Formula touches on more easily seen aspects of performance analytics, and new ways to depict and consume football in media. It also explores future possibilities hiding just below the surface, possible phenomena such as data manipulation as a kind of doping, the impacts of high-frequency sport betting, or politics related to data-based services like media, measurement and reporting.
Workshop · Product · 2012
What is 'the future', when 'the future' arrives as a printed junk mail catalog of yesterday's vision of the future?
Nokia Design Strategic Projects · Speculative Prototyping · 2012
A working networked speaker that explored live social listening with friends. The speaker allowed users to share and experience music together in real time, highlighting the social dynamics of connected audio. The interaction design aspects were carefully evaluated to focus on tangible rather than purely digital interactions; press the speaker grill for a satisfying “klunk” that would change “channels”.
Archived project
Workshop · 2012
I proposed a Design Fiction workshop and design sprint for Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination annual Emerge Festival. The goal was to provide an introduction to Design Fiction to attendees by actually doing a Design Fiction project. In this case, I proposed a short design sprint spending half a day in a seminar setting discussing possible futures of the corner convenience store, which is on its own a wonderful container of hopes, fears, dreams, and desires of a culture. The objective was to develop insights through discussion and some light research in 1/2 a day and then quickly translate these into a list of things you might find in a corner convenience store — and then construct these as props we could use in making a few tiny films that could exhibit the artifacts and what they implied about future products one might find in a corner convenience store from some possible future.
Research · 2012
This research project is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies (computers, mobile phones, sensors, robots, etc.). Gestures such as recalibrating your smartphone doing an horizontal 8 sign with your hand, the swiping of wallet with RFID cards in public transports, etc. These practices can be seen as the results of a co-construction between technical/physical constraints, contextual variables, designers intents and people’s understanding. We can see them as an intriguing focus of interest to envision the future of material culture.
Nokia Design Strategic Projects · Project Audio · 2011
A personal radio station for networked broadcasting and tuning, built to examine audio interaction through a dedicated physical object.
Nokia Design Strategic Projects · Los Angeles · 2011
2011
“Hello, Skater Girl” grew from a year spent with women skateboarders in Southern California. It records a scene that mainstream skate culture routinely overlooked, while taking seriously the particular work of gaining access, spending time, and becoming recognized and respected as a skate photographer. The resulting book I created brings photography, cultural research, immersion in a community, and independent publishing together as one form of representation and sense-making.
Published, 2012
Workshop · Talk · 2010
I facilitated a Design Fiction workshop on the ways Design Fiction can help discover unknown unknowns and build up our ability to imagine the unexpected and unanticipated — or just the things we would prefer not to think about. I did this at the Swiss Design Network conference in Basel Switzerland in October 2010.
2010
This panel will present and discuss the idea of “design fiction”, a kind of design genre that expresses itself as a kind of science-fiction authoring practice. Design fiction crafts material visions of different kinds of possible worlds. Design’s various ways of articulating ideas in material can be seen as a kind of practice close to writing fiction, creating social objects (like story props) and experiences (like predicaments or scenarios). In this way, design fiction may be a practice for thinking about and constructing and shaping possible near future contexts in which design-led experiences are created that are different from the canonical better-faster-cheaper visions owned by corporate futures.
2010
A photographic record of the Smith grind across skaters, pools, parks, contests, and sessions from 2010 through 2013.
Photobook project, 2010–2013
2009
The apparatus consists of a very tall pole which is used to gain a unique, portable vantage point to see the world. Two wide field of view cameras are used to capture video from the full height. The video is then processed to highlight specific features of the world below, mostly such things as the movement of people and the movement strategies. Individuals are highlighted using video processing algorithms to accentuate the flow of urban life. The motivation for this project is the noted urbanist, William H. Whyte, who wrote an important, short monograph that went along with a film, both called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
2008
The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards is used as instructions that guide you as you drift about the city. Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action.
The motivation for Drift Deck comes from the Situationist International, which was a small, international group of political and artistic agitators. Formed in 1957, the Situationist International was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations.
Near Future Laboratory · Speculative Prototyping · 2008
A hand-held digital worry bead exploring anxiety, touch, motion, duration, and the effort of making a soothing object.
Archived project
Prototype · Product · 2007
Slow Messenger is a product from an adjacent now in which there is a mode of communication in which speed is not prized, but rather the semantic weight of time, patience, thoughtfulness has to be accounted for. The product is the product of, the result of, research into the implications of Instant Messenger® and instant communication.
What I was trying to explore with this project was the idea that slowing down was resonant, could lead to a deeper appreciation of the message itself. In a world where we are accustomed to instant responses, the Slow Messenger invites us to reconsider the value of waiting and the anticipation that comes with it.
That's it. Plus, it gave me a chance to dive into CAD, 3D printing, explore slightly more complicated electronics prototyping (including IMUs back when those were new) and do some physical computing with microcontrollers, etc.
2007
MobZombies is a zombie-fleeing game where a player's movement controls an avatar in the game space. Players run away from virtual zombies by actually running. This was developed while I was a Professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division, as part of a project for the Mobile and Environmental Media class I taught in Spring 2007. The game was developed by grad students (at the time) Will Carter and Aaron Meyers.
2007
This is a speculative design fiction project in the form of an exploration and creative experiment in hardware, modifying PlayStation 2 controllers to integrate physical-digital (or hybrid analog-digital or, another way to name it is ‘modern mechanical‘ interfaces) interactions in gaming. I went about this with two approaches: one intercepting and modifying the console-controller communication, and another using microcontroller-based hardware to dampen joystick inputs over time (diminishing their ability to provide control inputs). I think of these experiments as a kind of "theory object," artifacts designed to provoke discussions. In this case, the discussion/musing is about the interplay between first-life physical activities and second-life digital worlds. Below you will find technical details, including Arduino-based prototyping, joystick potentiometer modifications, and code snippets showcasing the experimental process.
2005
Telephone “hotline” that captures opinions about President Bush on the eve of his second inauguration and then emails the President an audio file containing the spoken opinion, as well as providing an online repository of those spoken opinions. Public exhibition online.
2004
Pussy Weevil — a "proto-Tex-Avery" animated character with a malleable and virtually indestructible form. A vile, reactive persona that mutates, spits, and glitches. Exhibited at Bitforms Gallery May 15–June 19, 2003, and Ars Electronica 2003.
Pussy Weevil is an individual software animated character that responds to the viewer’s distance or proximity. The piece involves choreography in space and deals with subject / object relationships vis-a-vis the viewer. Pussy Weevil ignores you, outrageously derides you, tries to scare you but it runs away in fright if you get too close.
Pussy Weevil questions how digital characters can be affected by interactions in analog spaces and examines the relationship between the real and computer made worlds.
2004
MobileSCOUT, by Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow, is a public art project that collects audio narratives of your local surroundings, personal rituals and public sightings. Using your mobile phone, you leave a voice message of your observations about the flora (landscapes), fauna (characters) or behaviors (events) that populate your surroundings.
The project explores the use of mobile phones as tools for public art and storytelling, leveraging VXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language) to create a voice-based application that allows users to interact with the system through voice commands and touch-tone inputs.
This was all pre-smartphone, or just around the time of their early emergence — and before the whole idea of developing apps for mobile phones was available and even understood as “a thing”. It was an experiment in using the technology available at the time to create a collective audio tapestry of everyday life.
2002
PDPal is a series of public art projects for the Palm™ PDA, mobile phone and the web. It has pushed at the notion of mapping, attempting to transform your everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. PDPal engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments. In contrast to mapping projects that have utilized GPS and measurable cartography, PDPal has been anti-geographic and anti-cartesian, preferring to experiment with the construction of relative, emotionally based systems that ask what makes social or personal space.