A Conversation with Julian Bleecker: Author of The Manual of Design Fiction

Julian Bleecker, Ph.D., is an accomplished engineer and author of The Manual of Design Fiction. In the book, Bleecker, who also founded Near Future Laboratory in 2005, discusses how designers can tap into possible futures to help drive design decision-making.

FCAT’s Head of Design and Marketing, Will Reed, had a chance to catch up with Bleecker to uncover the secrets of the trade and how it can spur revolutionary innovation.

Will Reed: Before we start, I love your hat — it references the Steve Jobs-era phrase, "Imagine Harder.” Can you talk a little bit more about imagination and what role it plays in the process of designing technologies and products for the future?

Julian Bleecker: The idea of "Imagine Harder" is a call to action — almost an evangelical expression — reminding us of our remarkable evolutionary ability to harness our imaginations. We can dream of other worlds and bring them into being simply because we imagined them. It's a wonderful gift that we sometimes forget about, or we get into this mode of thinking there are other people who do it better, so we just follow them instead. We end up living in someone else's dream.

Will Reed: How have you seen the field of Futures Design changing over the last few decades? And do you have any predictions for what will be next?

Julian Bleecker: Futures Design has evolved from what I see as the “design thinking mode” — which focused on applying creativity to business needs — to a more expansive exploration of possibilities. We're entering a phase where there's a strong desire for more imaginative thinking, especially with emerging technologies that are difficult to fully understand and utilize.

It's almost like we have these alien collaborators in artificial intelligence. We sense their potential, but we're not sure how to apply it beyond traditional use cases, such as analyzing PDFs. There's a feeling of "what else?" To address this, we need to develop a broader language and new ways of thinking and making sense of things. This is where Futures Design, Speculative Design, and Design Fiction all come into play. They explore similar territories and have a similar definition of what a successful outcome might look like.

Will Reed: What impact or benefit do you see these practices having in relation to classic product development?

Julian Bleecker: As a product designer, I appreciate what product development can achieve. However, I'm less interested in incremental improvements — making things a bit smaller, the battery last a bit longer, or the device a bit thinner. I'm more fascinated by revolutionary changes versus evolutionary ones. This is where Futures Design comes into play, as it involves speculating about what could be, rather than just making superficial changes like offering new colors. To truly innovate, we need to bring a high-level of creative consciousness into the process overall.

I often emphasize the importance of creativity and curiosity. I believe it's crucial to hire more artists and bring more creativity and poetry into the workplace, alongside engineers. This blend of creativity and technical expertise is what made the early days of the Internet so exciting and expressive. We need to apply technology with a heavy dose of creative consciousness to achieve truly innovative outcomes.

Will Reed: In some of your past talks, you've mentioned that Design Fiction is like archaeology of the future. What do you mean by that?

Julian Bleecker: I want to relate it to the artifact, and in this case, the artifact is a prototype — the object from another world. The archaeologist is the individual who studies this thing they've unearthed that’s been layered over by the sediment of time. They hold up this artifact, wonder about it, and try to get it to tell them a story. I love that image — the archaeologist, perhaps with a pipe, pondering, "What is this thing? What stories can it tell?" With no one else to ask, they use their imagination to fill in the story. I like inverting that idea to think about what we're doing with Design Fiction and Speculative Design.

We're trying to imagine the artifact that will exist in some future world, and in that sense, Design Fiction is essentially the inverse of archaeology; instead of digging into the past, we dig into the future. It finds the artifact, holds it up as if we don't know its complete story (just a partial one), and lets that story effervesce into the room while innovators consider a new product.

This happened often during my time at Nokia. We'd put a beautiful object on the table without telling anyone what it was. People would say, "I'll have that one."

But what is it? "It's a phone of some description, isn't it? Tell me more. What are you seeing? What are you imagining around this little totemic object?"

Will Reed: In one of your talks, you referenced a phrase about imagination being like a muscle, and muscles need fuel. I'm wondering, in your everyday life as someone who's probably scanning the environment for new ideas or sources of inspiration, what fuels your imagination?

Julian Bleecker: A lot of it comes from just listening to what people are wondering about. It's a learned exercise, much like working out. This is my morning workout—trying to imagine new ideas based on something I heard someone mention or in a podcast. I then wonder how that idea translates into something normal, ordinary, and part of our everyday lives, like George Perec questioning your teaspoons. What would be that thing I take for granted in the future — a teaspoon? What would it look like in a world where AI is as normal and routine as televisions with which we converse?

It's about taking these miraculous moments and making them humble, ordinary, and mundane. That's part of the workout — using that muscle not just to say, "AI is going to change everything,” and instead asking, "How does AI change the clock radio next to my bed? Tell me that story.”

Will Reed is Head of Design and Marketing for FCAT. Will and his team focus on designing experiences for FCAT's technology incubators, building a human-centered design practice, teaching innovation methods, creating materials for FCAT thought leadership, and helping FCAT tell its innovation story.