Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Welcome to the Think Forward podcast where we have conversations with futurists, innovators and big thinkers about what lies ahead. We explore emerging trends on the horizon and what it means to be a futurist.
Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Think Forward EP 135 - Artifacts of Imagination with Julian Bleecker
What happens when you hold an artifact from a future that doesn't exist yet? A newspaper headline from 2045, a product manual for technology not yet invented, or a social media post from an entirely different world? These aren't just creative exercises—they're powerful tools for making abstract futures tangible.
Julian Bleecker, one of the pioneering architects of design fiction, takes us on a fascinating journey through his approach to imagining possible tomorrows. Julian shares his journey from building computers in eighth grade to pioneering design fiction, creating tangible artifacts from imaginary futures that spark meaningful conversations about tomorrow's possibilities.
• Discovered a love for technology as a child, building a Xerox 820 computer with an 8-inch floppy drive
• Needed two engineering degrees and a PhD to articulate what he'd been chasing—that "whoa cool feeling" of exploring possibilities
• Created TBD Catalog, a breakthrough project that materialized possible futures through a product catalog format
• Founded Super Seminars as experimental gatherings where no one person is the expert
• Describes design fiction as "future archaeology"—retrieving artifacts from possible futures to understand what those worlds might be like
• Emphasizes imagination as an evolutionary advantage and essential skill that needs regular exercise
• Advocates "imagining harder" as vital for navigating our rapidly changing world
• Recommends doing design fiction exercises 2-3 times weekly, 20 minutes each, to build imaginative fitness
• Works across disciplines, recently bringing design fiction approaches to policy discussions around AI
Find Julian at the following places:
His Patreon (SUPPORT HIM!) https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory
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His Podcast (LISTEN TO HIM!) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/near-future-laboratory-podcast/id1546452193
His LinkedIn (CONNECT WITH HIM!)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianbleecker
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Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.
Coming up on today's show.
Speaker 2:I didn't know what it was good for, but I knew that it was cool, it felt cool, and so I think you know I've just been trying to chase after that cool feeling from when I was in, you know, eighth grade or whatever, for my entire professional life, just trying to find the place, where and how to do that. And I think I, you know, I landed on something maybe when I wrote that essay Design, science, fact and Fiction that kind of led to kind of instantiating, saying out loud, design, fiction. I couldn't describe it in any kind of really thoughtful way. I had to get two engineering degrees and a PhD in history of consciousness to be able to find the way to say, oh wait, that's what I've been doing.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Think Forward Show. I'm your host, steve Fisher. Today we're venturing to one of my absolute favorite territories the mesmerizing world of design fiction. You know, there's something magical about holding an artifact from a future that doesn't exist yet A newspaper headline from 2045, or a product manual for technology that hasn't been invented, or a social media post from an entirely different world. These aren't just creative exercises. They're powerful tools for making the abstract future tangible, and there's nobody better to guide us through this than today's guest, julian Bleeker.
Speaker 1:Julian isn't just a practitioner of design fiction. He's one of the pioneering architects, from Nokia to his groundbreaking super seminars. Julian has transformed design fiction from a niche academic concept into something that shapes real conversations about innovation and the kind of world we want to build Today. We'll explore how creating artifacts from imaginary tomorrows is more powerful than writing reports about them. We'll discover Julian's concept of value circulation in the creative community and why nurturing your imagination isn't just a nice to have. It's absolutely vital for navigating our rapidly changing world. So get ready to spark your imagination with one of the most innovative minds in the field. Welcome to episode 135, the Art of Design Fiction with Julian Bleeker.
Speaker 3:So welcome, welcome to the show, gosh. It's funny how we've known each other these couple of these years and the field has changed. You know, when I always start these episodes, you know we always kind of do the the background stuff and I think you've had just this, this amazing journey. I mean you're a pioneer in the field. I mean you created really kind of. You talk about design fiction as the moniker, but as a you know, obviously other forms of fiction have existed in terms of that before. But, um, you know you've had this journey through, like art and technology and design. Could you share, like just tell people you know who don't know you, and then your path, um doing this into this field?
Speaker 2:yeah, how did I get to where I am? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, well, I think you know a lot of it kind of started if I were to think back with um, kind of really being into getting getting somehow getting into electronics and computers, like when I was super young, like eight years old or something, and it was just I think it was a time, um, and also the place. So I was. I grew up in princeton, new jersey, which is a university town, so you're kind of for something that was emerging at the time. Like you know, computers were around, but they were still not quite understood as to their potentiality. Or there was like a fictional notion or a particular notion that came from fiction about what they were, what they were good for and that kind of stuff as you might see through, like film, like war games, you know, so everyone's seen war games. That was like, oh yeah, what computers can do and the whole networking thing. So I got, you know, I got into that and um, and it was just like a wonderful kind of imaginative space because there still was a very blank canvas about what they were good for.
Speaker 2:You remember early days, like I don't know, like you were, your computers were being sold on the premise that they'd be a great, great way to um, keep your, your, uh, your uh, your recipe box. You transfer all your recipes from the index cards into the computer. Isn't that great, and it was just so desperate to try to make sense of what it was from a marketplace. And you're kind of going through that as a kid and and and building computers because you there were enough. Um, this is like early, this isn't like building a PC.
Speaker 2:This was like I remember going to this hobby fair near town. I think it happened. It was like an amateur radio hobby fair kind of thing and you could get, if you went there, you could get parts to build a Xerox 820. Now the other computers were around but there was a sensibility about building it yourself from the ground up and having it not be just something that was generally commercially understood. So it was different from getting an IBM PC. I don't think no one was really building IBM PCs back then. Maybe they were, I can't remember.
Speaker 3:No, they were proprietary, like the XTs. Those were all cases, right? Same trs, the radio shack trs 80, you know the. I had a ti 99. My dad had the trs. He had hidden floppy disks with his uh. He was, he's a civil engineer, so he did like a lot. It was um, water and steward, like plotting a lot of math. He thought it was like he discovered fire because like things that would take massive amounts of time on calculators or slide rules, like just the fact that you could plug in coordinates and it would like spit it out, snap of a finger. It was like. But we were. It was like you said, it was like the world's most expensive computer calculator. Right, yeah, but homebrewing was a different. That was a totally different thing and I don't it. Yeah, I mean, ibm tried to keep it, almost like Apple, like their enclosed ecosystem. So, yeah, I mean, did you build, did you finish the Xerox? Is that what your first computer you built?
Speaker 2:Yeah, xerox A20 with one 8-inch disk drive, 8-inch floppy disk drive, floppy disk drive, and it ran CPM and I got a command prompt and I was like cool and didn't. You know that was. That was part of the exercise, I think, but there was that. There was it just kind of feeling of something going on. And when you're you know, when you're in junior high building a computer, you're not necessarily sure exactly what that is. You're, you know, when you're in junior high building a computer, you're not necessarily sure exactly what that is. You're trying to make sense of it, but it's more the feeling and the vibe and the community. You know the, the group of you know full on, full on, right from central casting computer nerds. You know the one kid who was always wearing a jacket inside. You know the one kid his nose, nose was always running. It was a whole thing and doing that and then learning, you know. But with the network computers, like with modems, like that was just. It was just like an exploration with, with the, the sense of what it was and what it meant was. Um was just pure imagination, only imagining what it could, what it was and what it could do. So there was no specific task and sometimes you know you'd be like I'm going to write a game program or something like that. But it was allowing the imagination to fill in that space of possibility implied by the computer culture. So I used to go to the Princeton Public Library and read Byte Magazine. You'd read about what was going on, who was doing what. I didn't know what it was good for, but I knew that it was cool, it felt cool, and so I think I've just been trying to chase after that cool feeling from when I was in eighth grade or whatever, for my entire professional life, just trying to find the place, where and how to do that. And I think I, you know, I landed on something you know maybe when I wrote that essay Design, science, fact and Fiction that kind of led to, you know, kind of instantiating, saying out loud design fiction, because it felt like it held some sense of that. It was an architecture. It was an architecture around that Woku feeling. It was an explanation of it using.
Speaker 2:I didn't have the language when I was in eighth grade I couldn't describe in any kind of really thoughtful way. I had to get two engineering degrees and a PhD in history of consciousness to be able to find the way to say, oh know, two engineering degrees and a PhD in history of consciousness, to be able to find the way to say, oh wait, that's what I've been doing, that's, I've been trying to get that, and now I've. Now I've got a, you know, professionally in a position where it's like I can say it out loud enough people will pay attention to it, that I can then say that's what I'm going to do, that's what I do. I'm still, you know, it's like I got home, like I finally kept back to that thing that I wanted. That I kind of vaguely felt when I was in eighth grade, you know, high school, whatever and I found a way and I was able to ride the, the challenges of not doing that in when, in my commercial you know phase of my life, when I was working a job, I even remember, like my first job, uh at a college, which I was very excited to get, um was at, uh was that was a data general, so there was, this was just, you know, basically when they were becoming irrelevant because PCs and workstations were becoming more prevalent. I mean, I remember, you know, like Sun was on its ascendancy, so there's no more real need or, you know, the opportunity for selling a department-wide computer called the minicomputer was, you know, it was kind of losing its traction and I can remember feeling like this isn't that whoa cool feeling, not an amazing story company? I mean, there was a Pulitzer Prize winning book written about the company called Soul of a New Machine. So they have an important place in the history of computation and I am proud to have worked there, even though you know I didn't, I wasn't one of the figures in the book, but the um, the point I'm trying to make is, like you know, I, I, I, I got to where I am, I think, by just kind of circling back to what I wanted, what I felt when I was in in, uh, in junior high, and that is to be able to create things that feel like they've come from a possible future.
Speaker 2:My imagination is tuned up to, like you know, eight on a scale of 10, while I'm doing the work of trying to, you know, make, imagine what the future could be, and I do that, you know, mostly with blend of imagination, probably 80% imagination, 20% engineer, engineer, you know, actual programmer, um, which I think is is uh, somewhat, which is, which is just great approach to doing. You're doing work, that you're going to do futures work, um, so I'll say, you know to that it's like I'm not I wouldn't necessarily, with no aspersions like I don't consider myself a futurist. I guess in the, in the general way in which it's used in the, in the, you know, the vernacular understanding of like what a futurist is, is probably, I'm probably, I feel less associated with that. Uh, because I don't feel like I predict or prognosticate so much as create context for wondering and having conversations about what could be.
Speaker 3:Well, it's interesting, you said the word predict. How would you define a futurist?
Speaker 2:Well, there are probably a lot of category kind of semantic ways to get into that. One is like are you a member of the whatever association of feature? Uh, that's one way. I mean that's a category, legitimate, and people, um use that to affiliate with um, you know, professionally, but also because it's you know, it's a, it's a badge you can wear. I don't know if they make embroidered patches, but if they did, you could probably get one and wear it and and put it on your you this is. I also belong to this affiliation on your LinkedIn page and that kind of thing. So that's one way.
Speaker 2:The other way is, I suppose are you, do you orient your activities in your whatever it is that you do professionally in the direction of what could be? Are you operating in that space, in the direction of what could be? Are you operating in that space? And that's a little bit less instrumental in terms of defining it, but it's like are you, you know, I would in that sense, like you might say, and you might object, but you might say like well, I think Cory Doctorow is a futurist.
Speaker 2:He operates by thinking about what could be, both through his novels but then also through his kind of more public kind of discourse about how the Internet's just a pile of shit and all that kind of stuff. So there are a bunch of different ways. I think the ways that are interesting to me are probably less just personally, are probably less oriented towards first, I guess, commercial objectives, like if I can get myself in a position where I can stand in front of people and charismatically hold forth on what they should be doing, I guess that's sort of a little bit less interesting to me. Yeah, um, and I'm more of I enjoy making things that feel like they came from the future as opposed to, uh, starting out from a marketing perspective, I guess.
Speaker 3:No, no, it's a nice, that's a. That's a great answer. It's an honest answer. You know it's, I think, being a futurist, there's many interpretation. Like you said, there's affiliation, um, there's practice and you're right, there's different. You know, you and I are both design futurists and if they want to label these things because it's about communicating the future with like fiction or prototype, it's trying to synthesize the future in a way that people can touch and taste or read. You know they can experience it right versus I would and I I put a differentiation between I would call it the futures research, the strategic foresight. There's so many brands, there's some names of it, I think there's also.
Speaker 3:For many years, my futures work was really stealthy, covert because a lot of people just couldn't handle it or they weren't. That's just not the way they operated. But in terms of doing innovation work or product work, you had to have that lens right. You just brought the exercises in and you know you bring it in a different way. I think the way the world has really become, uh, the acceleration of change at the exhibit, the visible acceleration of change, combined with the uncertainty caused by things like COVID, all this kind of other thing that people are more open to. How do I be resilient? How do I deal with this change that's coming at me? Some don't want to at me, Some don't want to, but there's many that are looking at this as okay. This is happening. How do I address it? And I always look at it.
Speaker 3:As you know, futurists are never predictors. We look at possible futures Like we look at the possibility of what eventually might become to pass as the present. And how do you navigate that? And I think what you do is so important because you try and put whether it's completely, it is completely speculative. People can connect to it and understand that they're. You know what does this look like?
Speaker 3:I always keep thinking about jake dunnigan's work on and I think Stuart and him did it it was like like a flooding, like if, if Rhode Island was like flooded, like what is the future of like that, and what did the city change? You know like there are so many different ways to present possibility to people in a way that they can accept that and and understand that, and I think that's one of the awesome things that you do is you're able to also teach people how to do it. So, yeah, but you know for you what's a good example for you that kind of encapsulates the approach. Like somebody listening to hear the term design, they might think of science fiction or stories or world-built. You know, like universes, what's a project you do that you think that really captures this for people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I would go back to the project that set a trajectory, which was TBD Catalog. Oh, yes, the thing about that that I think gives a good explanation is that I emphasize the way in which it came into being. What was the work to actually get there? So that it's the thing that I don't think you oftentimes see in some context, like there's the catalog itself, the book which you can buy, you know, and then, but then the book itself, without revealing too much about, without, without um, taking down the fourth wall yeah, is it also in there? It gives you a sense of like, oh, how this came into being, which was in practical terms. It's like I just sent out an email to get a bunch of friends together to meet in detroit to spend a few days having conversations, but then getting materializing what we thought the future might look like at. From that I think it was 2008, something like that and we can have conversations, but what we want to do is we want to create a product catalog that feels like it came from the future, that we sort of think, as a mixed group of people artists and designers, grad students, museum curators, all these kinds of people, design, directors of major regional museums to imagine a future, but produce, on the other side of that, a product catalog as if it came from the future. Can we make the product catalog tell the story of what we imagine this future might be? And so for me, that's the architecture of a really good design fiction project. That is to say, you workshop the topic, but the outcome of the workshop is an artifact that has come from that future.
Speaker 2:So the output of it isn't primarily a PowerPoint deck or a bunch of pictures of Post-it notes. It's got to be something that allows people to wander into with their imagination what happened in that room, what people were thinking. But the explanation of what they were thinking isn't super didactic. It's just like oh, here's a product. Didactic. It's just like oh, here's a product, it's a, it's a, you know it's a, it's a. I don't know, you know it's. It's a Bitcoin mining machine, but it's. It's not an abstraction. It's like it looks like a piece of it's. It's, you know, sold at a particular price. It's described in a particular way, it's got a particular brand associated with it and it's got a little bit of you know kind of product reviews from consumers. So it starts to feel all of a sudden like, wait a minute, does this thing really exist?
Speaker 2:And I think that's the thing you want to get to is you want people to let their guard down and when they're exposed to the artifact whether it's a product catalog or a map or a newspaper, each of those have come from a future you want them to be like oh, this is just a newspaper. Or each of those have come from a future. You want them to be like, oh, this is just a newspaper, wait a minute, hold on, wait, what's going on here? And you want that little bit of a kind of a stumble where they're looking around and then they're looking to the left or right to look at someone and say like, hey, have you seen this? This is crazy. And once they're in that mode, now you're back to that whoa, cool feeling, hopefully, where you're like, you know, you're looking at the Xerox A20 with an eight-inch floppy that's a big floppy and you're looking at it and you're kind of like, whoa, what is this thing that you built?
Speaker 2:You know, imagine going into a world where computers didn't weren't. You weren't expecting to find a computer in the family room of an eighth grader on the floor, you know, a bunch of parts and a power supply that's almost bigger than the computer itself. You're like, what is going on here, what is this about? And then the kid's trying to explain to the adult. He's like so how does this? You got to hook up to the television set Like what the hell's going?
Speaker 1:on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I remember.
Speaker 2:You just want to get in that. You want to get in that wondering feeling, and I don't think PowerPoint really does that well. So that's why I kind of, you know, really emphasize making the thing that feels as if you see a PowerPoint. You kind of know what it is.
Speaker 3:It's that just totally sparked a memory, like when I had a TI, not my text instruments. This is 1982, 83. You had a RS two2 peripheral that I eventually bought. You had floppy drives and all that stuff, but you could record your programming to a cassette tape oh, totally, I had a recorder, that's my father could not wrap his head around that yeah that I could use a tape recorder.
Speaker 3:That was usually for like, mixed tapes or recording comedy, like that you could record a computer program on it. He's like that's on it. I'm like, yeah, and I played or recording comedy, like that you could record a computer program on it. He's like that's on it. I'm like, yeah, and I played it and it was like all the garble and I'm like watch and I loaded it back into the system and it was just like. I think it's because you put the.
Speaker 3:There's almost like this hard construct. As you get older, that's like it's harder, it's almost like a thicker wall around the believability or the, the flexibility of thought. And it's funny that you talked about the. You brought up bitcoin when it's so working in the space for a long time in the digital asset space. That was actually brought. It's funny that that sparked actually the reality of somebody came.
Speaker 3:You know, miners use a lot energy, so if you're a home for like and it also generates a lot of, it's a lot of heat. So somebody came up with the idea to create a Bitcoin miner. That was two things. One, it was an actual heat space heater for your house, your room, and because of the energy it produced, it would actually eventually pay your entire electric bill and you'd have a little bit. So your Bitcoin would heat your house but pay your entire electric bill and you'd have a little bit. So your bitcoin would heat your house but pay your electric bill and maybe have a little bit left over, like.
Speaker 3:So it was like it was the leap of the design, fiction to kind of go, oh, and then some of these things, people are like, well, can I do that, can I actually create that? Like, and that's the beauty of, I think, of this stuff is that it just gets people really connecting between the, the liminal space, between the possible and the like, even the problem, like I could, we could, we could do this, we're with this things, when this comes, we could, and I think that's that's what I love about this so much the space so, um, when you, you, you bring together, you mentioned the super seminars. Where did that idea come about? What do you achieve with that? What do you love about that so much? If people haven't checked it out, I'll make sure it's in the show notes so people can check them out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool. So there was a general seminar which started with the idea, you know, I don't know. It was like COVID and like there was lots of stuff going on. I'm not talking necessarily COVID stuff, but just like there was the crypto thing was going on and I was just doing a lot of like whoa, I wasn't kind of expecting this so much and so I was wondering about it and you're just kind of talking to people and during COVID the online thing became kind of hygiene. It's like everyone not just kind of tech nerds or whatever, or work-from-home people started getting a fluency with doing seminars online and that kind of tech nerds or whatever, or work from home people like started getting a fluency with with doing seminars online and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And I had this. I, it was just a. I just put it out there like hey, with a little bit of framing around it. Uh, I want to do be able to see if I can host a session where I don't have to. I'm not the expert in the room. I'm not the expert in the room, I'm the guy who kind of just got things together. I like community building. Maybe to a fault, I don't think I should be doing tons and tons of that, because I like to make stuff. Community building takes time.
Speaker 3:Well, you're making a community, it is making something. It is in the sense of creating. You are creating connection.
Speaker 2:so yeah, yeah, no, I think that's the point. It's, I'm not, I'm not opposed to it, it's just like, um, yeah, I wanted to see what would happen if I, if I, um, if I put something up and out there amongst the, the community basically was subscribed to my newsletter and said, hey, uh, with a little bit of you know kind of humor attached around it, uh, could propose something where it's like crypto, what the fuck, like I don't know, like, do you? You know, do you have any ideas? And that was the general theme, or the art, this kind of semantic structure around all these things. It's like I don't know, do you? But I bet if we get together in a room we can make some sense of it. You know, maybe inconclusively, but I didn't really have a lot planned for that in particular. But there were a couple of things. One thing I was like would people pay for this? Is there real value here that they'll pay for? And that was a question for me and I just kind of wanted to know as an experiment, me, and and I, and I just kind of wanted to know as an experiment, um, and then the other thing was could you, could you have a?
Speaker 2:It was an experiment with the kind of structure of this, of the seminar itself. In other words, what would happen if you if you led people and it kind of kind of guided them into the future, told them that they're going to the future, and now I want you to explore and almost like, almost like a Pilates for the imagination, go into that world and I want you to bring back some artifacts. Imagine that you ended up in someone's you know kitchen and we're talking about crypto. What? What do you find in that kitchen? So I was trying to find a way to get people to not just be very analytic or, even worse, say what they heard in the news directly, you know, like just parroting what they thought was the right answer. There's no right answer. It's you who's going there and imagining what you might find using your imagination, not what you know, elon or whoever says about what the future is, and so that was. You know. There were whoever says about what the future is, and so that was. You know.
Speaker 2:There were a couple of things going on there, and it was also sort of derived from an experience I had when I was in, when I was doing my PhD. We had this seminar where it was just like a course number and a general enough description of the course that you could basically come up with your own curriculum. And that was a kind of wonderful thing because all of a sudden I mean I guess it's also good for people who are getting a PhD. It's like you got to figure out if you're going to put together a curriculum, if you're going to someday teach how to do that I don't know. There's just a whole bunch of stuff going on there and I did that. At least once you get enough people together to say here's a topic and it was always.
Speaker 2:My understanding was that it should be something at the vanguard. In other words, we're not going to sit around and talk about 19th century European art history because that's already sorted. There's nothing we're not going to. What are we going to do there? I mean, you want something where it's like the basis of knowledge, like the epistemology, is under question or it's under development. There's no consensus about what the particular topic is.
Speaker 2:We wanted to look at how space that people occupy, physical space, architecture, urban planning.
Speaker 2:People were wondering how can we understand this with a social dimension attached, and there was a lot of social theory attached to it and I was like that sounds really cool. And my approach, my motivation, I think, was I'd been doing this kind of longitudinal research project. That became part of my dissertation, which was on video games that represented physical space, simcity I was looking at analytically very closely how does SimCity represent cities and what are the questions we can wonder about the game and how the game's implications of what a city is. It's kind of curious to explore and ask questions about and wonder and what are the opportunities. And then there was the early days of first days of of first person point of view games. So one game was it was a terrible game made by, underwritten by the imprimatur of Daryl Gates, who was the not very cool police commissioner of Los Angeles at the time. And so he was. He got himself involved in making the shoe games about cops terrorizing around Los Angeles, you know, and it was.
Speaker 3:It was such a wait, he was the chief during like Rodney King, wasn't he? And like OJ Simpson, that whole like era of the night.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that's what I remember on phone Cause he might've been the rampart scandal, I don't know Anyway, but he's, you know, career police guy, but very very clearly law and order.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, extreme, and so this is all you know. So then you're starting to be able to talk about how certain values can be embedded into video games, which isn't a surprise. But you have a case study and an argument and your grad students like, oh, this is gonna be great, and there weren't a lot of video game studies at the time. So I was interested in trying to find a theoretical framework to talk about these things, aside from just saying, like, man, this, the action is pretty cool, but the politics are shit. You know the I have to be a little bit more articulate when you're a grad student. So that was that was what, something like this seminar that we had in grad school, and I was like, can I do the same thing in a topic where no one's an expert? But you get in a room with a bunch of clever, bright, insightful people who are articulate and can wonder about it themselves, without coming in saying I'll tell you what this is, just coming and being like oh, here's what I see, here's what I understand, here's what I appreciate. And I think maybe this is related to this. You just have a discussion, and so that was the kind of basic architecture for General Seminar, which then later became Super Seminar, because I recognized that the people loved it. They were like this is great, when are you going to do the next one? And that kind of thing. And Super Seminar was just like a little bit of a flip to say of thing.
Speaker 2:And super seminar was just like a little bit of a flip to say I instead of I think at one point I was like, uh, my, my, my, my marketing was like ted is dead and he was. You know, the is the like. You know, let's, let's, we, we don't. I don't know, maybe I was playing dangerously with the idea of the decline of the expert, but it's like we have an expert on stage to hold forth like we can. We're smart people. We could be on the stage just as much as they could. So why don't we just kind of get together and and um and wonder about the topic?
Speaker 2:And that's when I would sort of I, I would have people I know in my community, who you know maybe, who had a perspective. Rather than it just being an open discussion, they would kind of like prompt the discussion. So it wasn't so much a presentation as it was kick us off, which is what we would do in the seminar in grad school. It's like each week when we met, one person would sort of be taken lead based on you know kind of what we had read for that week, and they would be the based on you know kind of what we had read for that week, and they would be the um uh, interlocutor who would start the discussion almost along, like okay, so here's what I'm saying, here's what I've been might be a good area to focus, and they would kind of they would sort of hold forth or read something or deliver something in to start the conversation and it'd be like maybe like a 15 minute kickoff discussion where everyone would listen and then we would have responses going on around around the seminar table.
Speaker 2:And so it was a similar sort of thing with super seminar, which is like let me get, let me get Kevin Bethune, like let me, let me, he's got a bunch of stuff that he could share, let me have him start. And then we would kind of go around and people would add their contribution and usually ended up, you know, kind of posing a question or pushing back on a point or stretching a point a little bit further, and I found that really, really interesting too, and people wanted it to where they would pay for it, and that to me, it's not so much about the commercial thing as it is to say there's value in this kind of work.
Speaker 3:Right, there's validation in that people will compensate because they appreciate your time and people's time.
Speaker 2:And they recognize that there's something for them in it. And all those things I think are really important in this space. Important in this space. Again, I'm not primarily, maybe, to a fault, motivated by the commercial opportunities, but I do recognize the importance of value circulation in one form or another. That means if you want to participate in this, you have to show that, you have to feel for yourself that it has value and, for better or worse, one of the ways, ways which we do that at this point in in the history of value creation, is we give someone folding money, say like thanks for that.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it that's good, that's helping me yeah, and it's.
Speaker 3:It's also a lot of times as a fellow artist, you almost you just want to share it with the world and it's almost like there's a guilt in like the taking, the, the, the idea of commerce, cause there's almost like I feel like a personally I can't speak for you, but I want to hear your perspective. There's almost like a guilt, like I don't want to. You're giving me money. It's like you're going to cause you want you think I'm a starving artist or he's supporting me, like, or he's supporting me like is there. But I just want to share it with you and I don't want to feel guilty like I'm. But at the same time you're right, like I happily, you know, pay to come to your seminar, because one of the things you you kind of offhandedly you know, because you like to create, but I view your community as a creation too.
Speaker 3:I mean, for those of you don't know, and I'll put it, I'll also put this in the link in the show notes there's a wonderful discord community and there's a lot of discords out there. I wish there was a way to like just hide or group, like the discord icons you know, like the ones you're kind of active on because, like you're my one of my top ones, like I love going in and just, and you have what? 10, 15 000 people right now? I think in that. How is this like?
Speaker 3:1200 what's that?
Speaker 2:1200.
Speaker 3:I think I thought it was like 10. I thought it was more than that. But but the thing about it, okay, well, there's not even a quantity, but there's a vibrancy. People are always. There's a lot of conversation in that and there's, you know, you want the. It's like that long. They're deeply futures, fluent futures, engaged, future practicing in some way.
Speaker 3:And I don't know, I always think of communities like this or just like a super seminars. I'm a big fan of the kind of gilded age of history. I really am fascinated. There's different periods, but I think I live here in Boston and in the West. There's different periods but I think, uh, we, I live here in Boston and in the West.
Speaker 3:There's the Berkshires and they used to have these. They were called quote unquote cottages where their mansions. But uh, edith Wharton's cottage still survives, it's called the Mount and you walk into this thing and it's like Downton Abbey. It's like you walk in and you imagine like they have somebody over for the wealthy to listen and they all have conversations. But it was such a small group, right, and it's like, now you think about it, you can have like super seminar where people can really be in that kind of environment. But it's for the world and I think that's just the beauty of of where we are in creating these spaces.
Speaker 3:Um, I don't know if you will react to that or how you thought you think about that, but, um, and I just think about your work and people who now do design fiction and do this type of speculative work. I mean, how do you? You've seen this journey, how do you see it? You know, what do you see for the much more common with people? Do you think GPT will help people write better, synthesize that kind of work? Where do you see this part of the field and the space growing? What are you?
Speaker 2:seeing Part of me feels like I'm looking forward to its evolution and I'm not sure how much I will be involved in in educational context. Like I'm going to USC tomorrow I'm doing two separate talks that I had to coordinate to be on the same day so I'd have to do right. Who are emerging into the practice and very grateful for the you know for for faculty integrating it into their curriculums and that kind of stuff globally. So it's super fascinating. So I'm curious how it is adopted and taken up and evolved by the generation or generation or two behind where I am professionally. Like what will it become? And I guess maybe that's just like a little bit of an allergic reaction to stasis and fighting. I want to see what the kids do with it. I don't mean that in a dismissive way, but it's like, you know, blues became rock and roll, like that's got to happen, and so I want to see what happens.
Speaker 2:You know, design fiction becomes what in practice. So I you know, I guess one little hope is like I feel like it's got exceptional value in lots of different realms that I just haven't been able to focus on. Me coming from product design, I think about it in commercial context and I think, coming from other realms, I found that people have wanted to figure out how to integrate it into other contexts. So late last year I worked in a workshop for a couple of days with pretty analytic, pretty serious policy people around the topic of AI, design fiction directly in the context of policy. But learning about what policy does and how it operates and how an approach like design fiction can be integrated into that has been super fascinating, and occasionally you just find people within that space who are expansive enough in their thinking that they can be like okay, I think we need to. If we're going to innovate in policy, we have to do more than just communicate what we believe are good structures around things like AI through a policy white paper that not a lot of people are going to read, or maybe the wrong kind of people are going to read.
Speaker 2:I don't mean wrong in a bad way, but just kind of people who are ungrounded. In other words, they're not living in the world that the policy is meant to implicate, but they're not. They're not normal humans who are just kind of going about their day all of a sudden wondering why is this? What is this new rule about? You know what my refrigerator must do. Where'd that come from? Whose idea was it to integrate this into you know? Or or a you know in a? In a more kind of pedestrian sense, like how come all the traffic lights are being taken down? I don't get what's going on here, cause some policy said, like you know, this is a waste of time and money and resources because now most vehicles drive themselves and know how to coordinate, uh, negotiating an intersection, don't need the traffic lights. You know, I mean, this is.
Speaker 3:These are extreme examples, but I'm trying to no, but you push the boundaries out and then it makes people go huh and then you can bring them back. You can back cast into those things. So that's the. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah, I love it, I love it uh, when you at usc, is this the film school or is this the?
Speaker 2:uh, one talk is at the film school and one one school is at the the dr dre school I can't remember what it's called, like the jimmy ivy, uh, dr dre, I can't remember his real name, they, they. They started an innovation school at USC. They wrote a big check, or promised that they would write a big check, and so they're doing. There's a workshop going on for through the weekend I think it starts Friday and goes through the weekend and then on kind of innovation in the AI space. So they asked me to come in and just kind of, um, get people excited, uh, to kick off that, that workshop. And then the other one is with the film school. So it was with Alex McDowell, total hero, um, designer, minority report played, runner, et cetera. Um, he, he asked me to come and do a talk at his class.
Speaker 3:That's great. Yeah, alex McDowell is a legend in the world building. Oh yeah, he's great. You may not. Maybe you've heard the term, maybe you know what it is, maybe probably don't know what it is at all Like when you introduce someone to the concept, what are the misconceptions people have? Because they'll think of design fiction. Maybe they'll see science fiction Like what are the?
Speaker 2:what happens when you first kind of introduce people to this? Yeah, I think you're right, I think there are. I'll be generous and say it's not a misconception. It's like these terms are preloaded with their kind of meaning and sense of what it is to people. When you say design fiction, it's a little bit of a I guess to a certain degree being provocative to say let's bring these two things together. They're all kinds of design and all kinds of fiction. But have we put them together very deliberately and set it out loud design fiction and then wonder what that might actually be and how it might operate? And so it requires a bit of explanation, usually through. This is what it is kind of in text and it's like now let me show you some examples of it and I think you can go through enough examples where they're like okay, and so you're saying it's the representation of possible futures in the form of a material cultural artifact.
Speaker 2:People are like what's a material cultural artifact? I was like, okay, good question. Imagine that you're an archeologist but rather than digging into the past or the ground, you're actually rooting around the future because, check it out, you got a time machine and this time machine you can go into possible futures. It's not a very good time machine because you're not sure exactly where you're going to end up and you don't have a limited amount of time when you're there. And one of the things about this kind of quantum entangled time travel is that you can't actually talk to people You're not on their plane but you can see artifacts and see objects, and so what you're able to do like an archaeologist is grab an artifact and that becomes like the traditional, the trad archaeologists. They have an artifact and their entire career has been puzzling over it. What is it? What does it mean? Where did it come from? What does it represent about this world? And they, they have to tell a story about that world. Now they might not say that they're storytellers, but they are telling a story to help us imagine into what that world could have been and what it was like.
Speaker 2:What were his power structures? What was forms of value exchange? What were his power structures? What were its forms of value exchange? What were its hierarchies? Did it have something understood as a family unit? So how did it operate? Was it extended? You know, all these kinds of things are what the archeologist is trying to do with the assumption that this will help us understand where we've come from.
Speaker 2:What I'm trying to do is the same thing to say wonder into where are we getting to or where do we. The same thing to say wonder into where are we, where are we getting to? Or where do we want to get to, what, what is that? What is our success condition for ourselves as beings in this world in some possible future? And to doing that less through prose.
Speaker 2:So it's not prose fiction, object, that is, that feels like it's not quite. You know, it's a little bit here and now. I sort of recognize it, just like you might. You know, in the trad archaeologists they might come and say this looks like a bowl and maybe this bowl was used to eat out of. You know, you look at it, it's familiar. In that sense it's not completely alien. It's evocative of something that you can sense and feel into as a person existing in the here and now.
Speaker 2:Can you do the same thing with objects that feel like they could have come from, that could come from a possible future, and can you make them evocative enough to get someone to say like, okay, I'm sort of getting a sense? This is kind of interesting here. It's got a kind of form to it that feels familiar or actually that's crazy. It's got a. It's got a. It's got a. It's got an Apple logo on it. Huh, I wonder what's up with that.
Speaker 2:And and you start getting it, you know you're connecting it into feelings and the overall goal isn't to predict what it might look like. It's fun to kind of work these things through and create the artifacts. I think the thing you're trying to do is kick someone's imagination into gear, is to really kind of give a shock to the system, to be like oh yeah, now we're doing something, we're opening up a conversation about what could be in, about the future. So my meta goal is to just get people to imagine harder, like, remember that we've got this evolutionary advantage of being able to imagine the world. Otherwise. Now I don't know if it's true, but it's fun to think that we are particularly well-suited, as you know, humans with this kind of lump of vascularized meat in our head that we call brain, to be able to do that, to imagine into possibility.
Speaker 2:And part of doing design fiction is to do the design fiction but also remind ourselves that we have this existentially vital capacity capability to imagine. It's kind of remarkable. We can imagine something and actually create it. I was talking to some architects the other day. What you guys do is amazing. I mean, you have this image in your head of a thing that could be, and then you go through these steps, you articulate it and represent it in different ways. You might make a model, you might make a 3d render and at some point someone's like I. I feel your imagination to such a degree that I'm gonna write you a check. And now can you get your engineers together and start pouring concrete. I mean, that to me is just like what that's crazy, or same thing with film. You know all these different ways in which we imagine and and instantiate our imagination, from artists to you know god bless them the people who make financial models, who are as much doing fiction as anyone else.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, yeah, exactly, I was just saying yes, I'm from financial forecast. Yeah, that's definitely a piece of design fiction, you know, projections. Well, that leads to, you know, one of the questions I've. I've also had to deal with a lot as in doing innovation work and product work, dealing with strategists that are more forecasters, I would say, more short-term than not, in terms of that long-term strategy. Let's just take, for example, how to incorporate, how can people do this is my question to you. But I'll cite an example Doing your user experience design, you do persona work, you create personas.
Speaker 3:So I changed the name. I called them persona, you know. You know it was you the the story of a persona, or the persona story, or like a person of the future, like I changed the name of it because a lot of times people almost like they have a reaction to fiction. The word for design like what is? You know, it's like stories, persona stories, like just changing the thing so that there's like almost a semantic, easier acceptance. You know, when you're talking to students and they're going to go out in the world, how do you, when you talk to you know your clients or people are thinking about it? Just like you talked about the architect. How do you, when you talk to you, know your clients or people are thinking about it, just like you talked about the architect? How do you get them to like meaningfully incorporate this stuff like you could do? How do you work with them to kind of teach to fish?
Speaker 2:yeah, I guess I just teach them. I mean, I usually just teach you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the simple thing is, like they, these kind of go along with like what I sort of refer to as like design fiction 101, which is, you know what is it, how do you do it? And then actually doing it in a either either, you know, like a case that is relevant to them or actually a problem that they're trying to work through relevant to them, or actually a problem that they're trying to work through. And if it's a problem that they're trying to so there's a problem that they're trying to work through, it's usually a much more longitudinal engagement. If it's like they're just like we want a sense of of what this is and how it works, then it's usually like um, you know, they, they just gotta, they just gotta go through, learn about what it is, and then get the, get the workbook and work through a bunch of problems that are more like uh, yeah, remember you like learning, calculus or whatever.
Speaker 2:There was the problem sets at the back of each chapter that you just got to work through, and you're not trying to solve a problem in in a, in a instrumental sense. You're not trying to figure out how are we going to get this rocket booster to separate at the right rate or whatever. You're just kind of going through hypotheticals. And I think, doing the hypotheticals, it's like you know if you're, if you, if you run, I mean I don't know, you know if you, if you, if you ride a bike, you're um, you know um, cycling enthusiasts, so you're, you're really into cycling.
Speaker 2:There might be something that you're working towards, like a race or whatever, um, but whatever you do, you just gotta you just gotta keep riding your bike and you gotta have a routine with it. I think doing this kind of work is similar like you just need to do a lot of it, um, but as a daily routine, and at first it hurts, you know, just like when you start riding a bike or running or doing Pilates or lifting weights, whatever it is that you do, at first it hurts, but you know that there's a, that there's a, there's a, there's a fitness goal. That is just general, like I just want to feel fit, I want to feel better, or whatever, and you start, you sort of start working towards that. I think you know doing these kinds of things is similar like you should do it. Yeah, do a little design fiction exercise, like two or three times a week, 20 minutes, yeah, and just as a routine, because that instills that sense of.
Speaker 2:I think it bulks up the imagination. So you got a really, really fit imagination and it gets you thinking beyond the, the you know the constraints of expecting someone else to come up with an idea or just parroting some other idea that you heard. It moves beyond the kind of hygienic responses to, like, what's the future of AI? Like no one. I haven't heard any kind of articulate statement about that. Really, when it comes down to this, oh, we'll be able to have conversations with Uber's 10K filing. It's like, okay, now you're really struggling, but we don't know what the answer is. And we can accept that we don't know what the answer is, but we should be exploring the possibility space expansively, like doing things that don't necessarily imagining, things that don't necessarily make directly make any sense.
Speaker 2:That was one thing that I did with the policy group was I came to that workshop with a newspaper that I called Applied Intelligence, tomorrow's News Today, which I thought was fun, and the idea was to create a newspaper, an artifact that had come from an AI future, that really looked around the boundaries of what that future might be like and what might it be like to live in a world where AI is just as normal, ordinary and everyday as, like a Wi-Fi connection at a coffee shop.
Speaker 2:What does that world look like and feel like? And I think that for me, because I did the newspaper, that was like a wonderful like feeling really good about doing like a marathon, like yeah, that was harder, but I enjoyed it. You know, and I think that's because, like I'm doing these things routinely, I feel like getting to a state where that is possible, where people are as enthusiastic about doing it as they are about jogging or whatever people are doing, rucking then we're in a good place. And I think, again, that's back to that meta goal of we need to remind ourselves that we have an imagination and we need to use it. We need to remind ourselves that we have this important capacity and ability that I feel like is maybe diminished a bit I might be overstating it for the purposes of being evangelical, we need to imagine harder.
Speaker 3:No, that's a great term to kind of as closing on this conversation, because you're going to talk to all these students tomorrow and it's good advice for them to make that kind of impact. You look back, you have many more years ahead, but I always like to ask about the legacy question, having your work remembered, the impact. What would you like that to be? People look back and think about Julian and the amazing work you've done, and people look back and think about Julian and the amazing work you've done.
Speaker 2:So, uh, you know, if, if, if I I getting the feeling that I've I've touched people and shaped their way of thinking and um their, their sense of you know, what they, what, their own possibility, and it was centered around this idea of you know, imagine harder, Like I learned how to imagine from that guy. That would be, that'd be great, That'd be amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a. It's a wonderful way to way to think about it. So, for those who want to find you cause you have such amazing content out there, like what, what's coming up for you that you'd like people to know about and where can people find you?
Speaker 2:yeah, so they can find me at nearfuturelaboratorycom or which is, um, more or less a trimmed down version of that, and we got it. You know everything's on there. I got the podcast, uh, which is just the near future laboratory podcast, and we got a newsletter, which is a bit infrequent. All the usual kind of platforms and stacks, patreon these are all places where you can, where you can find, find me.
Speaker 3:And I'll put that all I'll be on the show notes for people listening. You want to check it out too, so I'll have links for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's great Thank. Thank you for the time today, julian. It's been always a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate you asking for me to join you, steve, and it's been wonderful talking to you as well.
Speaker 3:Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to the Think Forward podcast.
Speaker 2:You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at wwwthinkforwardshowcom, as well as on YouTube under Think Forward Show.
Speaker 3:See you next time.
