Imagination is your evolutionary advantage.
It's what unlocks your unrealized potential.
Imagination leads to inspired sense-making.
It offers a vision of the possible and what could be 'next.''
It shows us the Angels of opportunity at the vanguard — beyond the edges of the expected, the here and the 'now.'
Near Future Laboratory is a creative design, technology and strategy studio.
It was founded by Julian Bleecker in 2004.
Over the last twenty+ years, he has helped the world's largest and most forward-thinking organizations make sense of, and respond to, the kinetic dynamics of their operating environments as a consultant, facilitator, creative partner, and even as an employee.
Near Future Laboratory is known for its unique approach to translating analytic research, social-technological trends, and the dreams for possible futures of these kinds of organizations.
This approach brings clarity to the challenge of imagining strategic futures, and a vivid sense of 'what could be'.
We do this through tangible, legible, and meaningful artifacts that provoke conversations, evoke new knowledge, augment sense-making, and help guide and communicate vision.
We sometimes refer to this approach as
Design Fiction combines the material making practice of 'design' (considered broadly) with a keen awareness that objects are containers representing the hopes, fears, dreams, and desires of cultures.
Design Fiction offers a methodological way to simultaneously make, reflect, study, and imagine possibilities.
It combines analytic research, with creative practices; sense-making through making-making. Design Fiction translates speculations into evocative, conversation-starting tangible objects.
Approaches
ASIC: Analyze. Synthesize. Imagine. Create.
My approach is not rigid nor fixed. There is no 'proprietary' process applied rote to every engagement.
I research and analyze the various ways that the future is represented, synthesize the insights and implications, imagine how the analytics might find their way into a world, and become integrated and integral to the world — and then create representations of how they might become part of everyday life in order to ground Imagination and make possiblity tangible and relatable.
Sometimes this feels like playing the part of an archeologist who 'digs' into possible futures and finds the shard of material that has come from that future.
Sometimes this requires experimenting with the forms we express our insights & knowledge. Sometimes it means that the arrangement of our ontological furniture should take help us see the world from other vantage points, or move us adjacent to our routine and hygienic ways of being and occupying the world. Shifting the contexts of expected outcomes, delivering insights in something that augments the old-fashioned report, PowerPoint deck or video presentation is crucial for integrating comfort with uncertainty and the unexepected.
We emphasize the creation of actual material cultural implications of the future, of the next, of change. Holding them in the hand, as if artifacts that have come from some future is instrumental in representing the dreams of possibility. When you can hold in your hand the 'not true yet', it changes the way you sense-make, communicate, and relate to the unknown.
(And it is more effective as communication, and travels more effectively, as a material artifact rather than an email or, heaven forbid, another PowerPoint deck.)
Operating Systems
Range of interests & constant skills-building, curiosity, and an intrepid creative spirit are what undergird my philosophy.
I believe Imagination is our most valuable and existentially vital capability
Bringing Creativity back into rich, meaningful collaboration with Rationality is my mission.
Finding the ways Imagination and Structure can become more integral to the epistemologies and ontologies of what we often refer to as 'work' is what I strive to achieve in what I create. There seems to me to be no more important task at hand.
Integrating Imagination into ways of sense-making and strategy isn't a deviation, but rather the way to see into the unknown. Imagination is how we see unexpected opportunities.
To Imagine thoroughly, one must have an optimism and intrepid spirit that assumes that the unexpected and unknown at the edge of the map is full of Angels — not Dragons.
