“Everyday intelligence?”
Think of this as: AI as it enters normal, ordinary, everyday rituals, creative work, institutions, homes, devices, policy up and down the governance stack, and decision guidance.
Commissioned work and research practice
Near Future Laboratory helps teams make emerging futures tangible, observable, and ready to work with.
Near Future Laboratory works with organizations and executive teams on futures strategy, artifact-led prototyping, workshops tied to active initiatives, and select advisory engagements.
This work is most useful when innovation, policy, product, brand, and creative R&D teams need a better way to explore unfamiliar territory, evaluate adjacent possibilities, and move from abstraction toward evidence, shared language, and decision-grade insights.
Julian Bleecker brings a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, where he studied with anthropologist James Clifford, historian of science Donna J. Haraway, and philosopher-activist Angela Y. Davis; graduate studies in HCI engineering, STS, and socio-technical systems at the University of Washington; and electrical engineering and computer architecture studies at Cornell.
Imagination is your competitive advantage. I help you imagine harder.
WHAT EXCITES ME RIGHT NOW
I'm excited to make new forms of “everyday intelligence” feel legible, meaningful, aligned, and useful in the world.
I help emerging technologies find their human form.
Not just hardware as meaning-making apparatus, nor software as meaning-making contrivance; my work moves across domains through artifacts, interfaces, stories, rituals, prototypes, workshops, and built product fictions to make new technologies legible as culture and useful as experience.
Creative tools
New instruments for making-meaning — tools that support the representation of human imagination, creativity, not just tools for the automation of tasks.
Embodied and spatial computing
Computational intelligence we hold, wear, hear, feel, and move through; embodying cognition and expression — not only software on a screen, or beter meeting summarization; new forms of everyday intelligence that are spatial, embodied, and relational.
NEW FEATURE — Tomorrow's News Today
Strategy as Fiction & Anticipatory Research: translating emerging signals into speculative prototypes — news, products, reviews, and ads that help teams understand, communicate, and take action.
The Adjacency / Apr 08, 2026
‘Right to Access’ Debates Continue
Imagine a world where access to high-quality large language models (LLMs) is contested. Some want it treated as a right. Some view it as a market privilege, associating its cost with an increasingly private-privilege world. Others consider access to the facilities and capability of LLMs as something that should be a redistributable public resource. This near-future reported feature explores the implications of each scenario and the ongoing debates surrounding equitable access to LLMs.
These pop-up articles are speculative news artifacts: a way to make emerging conditions tangible enough to inspect, discuss, and act on.
Research orientation
AI futures need more than prediction. They need model worlds, artifacts, and ways to notice what ordinary planning misses.
Design fiction, anticipatory research, and speculative prototyping make possible AI behaviors, institutional effects, agentic interactions, and misalignments observable before they settle into everyday practice.
Socio-technical systems
Understand AI through institutions, incentives, rituals, interfaces, governance, and everyday use, not just model capability in isolation.
Speculative model worlds
Create small designed scenarios, artifacts, and prototypes for rehearsing unfamiliar behaviors, agentic interactions, and second-order consequences.
Failures of imagination
Surface unknowns, anxieties, hopes, and edge cases that conventional strategy, policy, or engineering processes often miss.
When to bring Near Future Laboratory in
A broad strategic question is too vague. Our approach anchors sense-making and decision-making by turning that vagueness into something grounded, tangible, and specific.
This kind of work is most useful when leadership needs more than inspiration and pretty PowerPoint mock-ups: your team also needs something relatable enough so that you can move the conversation away from naive assumptions. You want to see the explore optionality, challenge assumptions, see and sense the expansiveness of the new terrains, and make a decision with more confidence.
A product or innovation decision needs specific options
Use artifacts, prototypes, and design fictions to give leadership something specific to evaluate, compare, and discuss.
A strategic direction is still too vague and abstract
Make an emerging technology, market shift, or adjacent opportunity tangible enough for a team to align around and act on.
An active initiative needs sharper alignment to the strategy..and momentum
Support a real program with workshops, prototypes, and advisory work that move the work forward rather than simply energize the room.
Proof
20+ years
Helping organizations make unfamiliar futures tangible enough to debate, test, and act on.
Clients include
Google, Apple, IKEA, Netflix, Samsung, Princeton, Amazon, DeepMind, Warner Bros., and more.
Outputs
Artifact-led strategy engagements, functional prototypes, design fictions, workshops, executive sessions, and advisory support.
Why hire NFL
Bring Near Future Laboratory in when you need futures work that can stand up to real constraints, scrutiny, and decisions, not just stage an inspiring talk.
Ways of working together
The work usually takes one of four forms.
These are starting points, not rigid packages. A workshop can be part of the work, but the aim is always to give your team something tangible to inspect, discuss, and use.
Artifact-led strategy engagements
Use catalogs, newspapers, props, documents, and other diegetic artifacts to make strategic options inspectable and discussable.
Prototype and concept commissions
Build functional and speculative prototypes that help a team learn faster, align more precisely, and test what should exist next.
Workshops for active programs
Design fiction workshops, sprints, and seminars tied to a real initiative rather than a one-off inspiration exercise.
Select talks and advisory work
Keynotes, executive sessions, and targeted advisory support when they advance a broader strategic or organizational effort.
Why this approach works
Humans are bad at acting on abstract futures, but good at responding to things they can touch, sense, and tangibly inspect.
Near Future Laboratory uses artifacts, prototypes, stories, and immersive formats to give teams something tangible to react to. When tomorrow becomes graspable today, the conversation changes. Different options appear. Better decisions become possible.
I ground the work in the constraints, details, and realities of a contingent world rather than keeping it at the level of abstraction. That makes it more useful for teams who need to make real decisions, not just have an inspiring conversation. It also makes it easier to integrate the work into existing processes, roadmaps, and initiatives rather than letting it sit apart as a one-off creative exercise.
That is the point behind design fiction here: not atmosphere for its own sake, but a disciplined research and strategy method for making emerging futures legible enough to work with.
Selected work
See how this work has been used in practice.
Artifact-led strategy
TBD Catalog
A catalog from the future used to compress debate, surface assumptions, and open adjacent possibilities beyond a slide deck.
Artifacts that make the future tangible
“Tomorrow's News Today”
A newspaper artifact from an AI future that makes policy, model-behavior, and governance implications felt through familiar everyday media.
Prototyping and concept development
Speculative Prototyping
Prototype — physical, speculative, software, hardware — work that makes early ideas observable, testable, and legible before they settle into roadmaps or budgets.
Workshop for an active initiative
Ericsson AI Futures Workshop
A design-fiction sprint built to help participants move from abstract AI hype toward specific futures, artifacts, and judgments.
Keynotes and public talks
AIGA Design Fiction Keynote
A public-facing talk that shows the voice of the practice, but also signals the deeper strategic and pedagogical work behind it.
Range and execution
Netflix Atlas Film Consulting
Proof that Near Future Laboratory can operate across strategic fiction, worldbuilding, production reality, and high-stakes collaboration.
Research through speculative prototyping
AI Prophetic Research Studio
An ongoing research studio using functional prototypes and speculative interfaces to explore agency, authorship, trust, collaboration, and human-AI interaction.
Entrepreneurial hardware experience
Prototyping the OMATA One
I founded OMATA in 2015, built the OMATA One from prototype to manufactured hardware product, led across product, engineering, brand, manufacturing, firmware and iOS software (my first retail iOS app), wrote and submitted the core IP patent for the company (US utility patent) then sold the company in 2022.
AI policy and governance
AI Policy and Governance Working Group
I facilitated a working session in AI policy and governance using speculative artifacts to examine delegated authority, institutional trust, accountability, AI agents, and governance questions before defaults form.
Latest writing
Recent notes and musings from the blog.
Most recent / Jun 28, 2026
The Reality Effect of Technoscience: My Dissertation, Now Free To Read
The Reality Effect of Technoscience is my 2004 PhD dissertation in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It studies virtual reality, Jurassic Park , and SimCity2000 as technoscientific artifacts that become socially and culturally real through institutions, media, software, audiences, and technical practice.
Latest newsletter
Signals, notes, and dispatches from the weekly-ish newsletter.
Most recent / Jun 23, 2026
MW26-Y26
Join the Office Hours N°314 on June 26, 2026, for a collaborative session focused on Design Fiction and speculative practice. This week's gathering will feature project-share slots, allowing participants to present their work and receive constructive feedback. The session promises engaging discussions on creative projects, tools, and systems. Additionally, explore the sale of four essential Design Fiction books, including *The Manual of Design Fiction* and *Androids Dream of Electric Sheep*, which serve as valuable references for imagination and speculative scenarios. Upcoming events include a conversation on identity and ethics at Dubai Future Horizons with Professor John E. Katsos and a workshop on Futuring 2.0 in Denver, where participants can apply futuring techniques to their projects.
Latest podcast
Conversations around design, futures, culture, and technology.
Most recent / Jun 25, 2026
N°104 - Marina Zurkow & Sarah Rothberg
The podcast is back from hiatus with a fun one! Episode 104 is a conversation with Sarah Rothberg and my dear old friend and collaborator Marina Zurkow about More&More, their speculative card-deck and worldbuilding framework for making strange, useful futures with other people. We talk about why constraints are better than blank canvases, how a handful of absurd cards can quickly open up a whole social world, and why the point is not to invent dystopias but to imagine worlds you might actually want to live in. Along the way: the Whitney Museum, Hudson River speculation, public kitchens and bathrooms, communication by scent, abolitionist futures, AI ethics, material responsibility, and the impossibility of being perfectly virtuous while living inside messy technologies. It’s rangy, playful, and serious in the way good speculative work tends to be. Love these guys.
Tomorrow's News Today
Strategy as Fiction & Anticipatory Research: translating emerging signals into speculative prototypes — news, products, reviews, and ads that help teams understand, communicate, and take action.
The Adjacency / Apr 08, 2026
‘Right to Access’ Debates Continue
Imagine a world where access to high-quality large language models (LLMs) is contested. Some want it treated as a right. Some view it as a market privilege, associating its cost with an increasingly private-privilege world. Others consider access to the facilities and capability of LLMs as something that should be a redistributable public resource. This near-future reported feature explores the implications of each scenario and the ongoing debates surrounding equitable access to LLMs.
These pop-up articles are speculative news artifacts: a way to make emerging conditions tangible enough to inspect, discuss, and act on.
If you'd like to talk
If this feels useful, let's talk about the work.
Let's connect and talk about the question or initiative that's on your mind, discuss rough timing, and what needs to become tangible.
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