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My friend Tom Guarriello joins me to unpack a deceptively simple question—why do some things matter more than others?

How is it that “brands” are rarely just products.

Tom describes how they’re meaning-machines: coffee cups, clothes, grocery aisles, and the everyday objects we carry through life are the things that quietly scaffold identity, aspiration, and sense of belonging.

Choice arrives instantly; explanation comes later.

Tom’s “meaning stack” helps us understand the rise of culture brands those brands that don’t just sell products, but stage worlds: concerts, exhibitions, lifestyles, and point-of-view.

Tom's new book gets into all of this and more. Check out his "The Meaning of Branded Objects".

https://tomguarriello.com

Here we are — where imagination becomes strategy and art is the engine of innovation. This is a rebroadcast of my conversation in Episode 54 with my friend Dave Gray - artist, visual thinker, and founder of the School of the Possible - in which we explore how drawing and creativity can unlock new ways of seeing, thinking, and shaping the future.

Simple sketches can transform complex ideas and help organizations envision possibilities that don’t yet exist — Dave is a maestro.

In our chat, Dave shares stories from his journey as an illustrator, consultant, and teacher, revealing how visual storytelling and hands-on creativity are essential tools for navigating uncertainty and designing better futures.

Whether you’re a strategist, designer, or just curious about the power of art in business and life, this conversation will inspire you to pick up a pen, embrace your imagination and let it help you create the future you want to inhabit.

Here is the link to the video we discuss: ⁠https://youtu.be/9pLCIoBZzd4

You'll want to watch that first — I mistakenly said I would include it but I don't want to rug Kirby's Youtube channel!

This is a special an curious episode of the podcast — a broadcast from my weekly Office Hours where people join to share and discuss their various “side projects”.

Last Friday Kirby Ferguson joined to share his latest video project, “Infinite Remix”.

So, you'll want to watch the video here: https://youtu.be/9pLCIoBZzd4 as I won't be playing it here so as to respect Kirby's work on his Youtube channel.

As a filmmaker, educator, and writer, Kirby Ferguson has been on the pulse of creativity and its evolution for decades. "Infinite Remix," is a visually enthralling an engaging exploration of artificial intelligence's role in creativity today. One is taken on an Adam Curtis-esque journey through the AI landscape, pondering how machines interact with human creativity and, ultimately, transform it.

I hope you enjoy this special edition of the podcast!

Don't forget — please support this work over on Patreon: https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory

The value I am assuming you get from this work is more than "0". It's only $10 a month, an it really helps make it easier to spend the time and cover the costs of production and platforms this content lives on would be a great way of showing me that the work matters more than "0".

Thank you!

(p.s. Join Office Hours by joining the Patreon!)

Please support the podcast over on Patreon.

https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory

We don’t suffer from a lack of imagination about the future. We suffer from too much of the same imagination.

Every deck, every keynote, every speculative prototype—still echoing the same tropes: chrome cities, self-driving pods, dystopian biotech. A future flattened by repetition. Familiar. Market-tested. Boring.

In episode 100 of the podcast, I caught up (again) with the gang at N O R M A L S.

We found ourselves circling this question: Why do so many futures feel interchangeable? And what would it take to build ones that aren’t?

Their proposal: Near future archetypes—modular, remixable worlds that aren’t just provocations but tools. Not just imagined futures, but working assets for innovation, policy, and design. Think less “trend report,” more “playable terrain.”

It’s a shift from one-off spectacle to living systems. Instead of discarding scenarios each year, why not iterate them? Build them out like open-source lore. Let them gain rules, friction, culture. Let them become strange enough to surprise us.

Because here’s the quiet truth: people don’t just adopt futures because they’re rationally compelling. They adopt them because they feel like home — familiar, evocative of something deeper, some feeling they have been chasing after, some vision of a world that probably goes back to the worlds they imagined when they were kids, or visions they integrated into their imagination that felt ‘cool’.

So maybe the work is not only to critique the dominant tropes, but to seed alternatives that others want to live in—and then give them tools to help build those places themselves.

Maybe the job isn’t just to map what comes next. Maybe it’s to make futures that feel like a place worth going.

What’s one overused future trope you’d like to retire—and what would you like to imagine instead?

https://normalfutu.re/nfa/nfa-essay-pt1/

Outgoing is Brett Gui Xin and Del Hardin Hoyle, they are a creative design team based in Brooklyn. In this chat we discuss their participation in some recent design fairs which gave them a chance to take a break and reflect back on a busy stretch of work. Their media are various: sculptural furniture, music, performance, found materials.

We got into their creative processes, the uniqueness of their collaborative practice, and their defiance against the dominant corporate culture in design. They emphasize the importance of maintaining creative independence, the emotional aspects of their work, and the joy found in creative exploration.

Good stories, great lessons.

Please consider supporting the podcast by becoming a Patron: https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory

https://www.wallpaper.com/design-interiors/one-to-watch-brooklyn-studio-outgoing

https://www.instagram.com/outgoinghq

https://outgoing.website/

https://www.wallpaper.com/design-interiors/one-to-watch-brooklyn-studio-outgoing

https://www.instagram.com/delhardinhoyle/

https://www.instagram.com/brettguixin/

Visit Normals

In my book ‘It’s time to imagine harder’, my hypothesis was that bringing the creative consciousness back to work is a clear path to unlocking the unexpected and unanticipated. A way to sense into and feel for the unseen. The creative consciousness - which has a proclivity or impulse to operate comfortably even enthusiastically with the unknown — can dream of the undreamt as if were soaking in a warm bath of ambiguity.

The creative consciousness ambles around in the new territories and terrains for which the old ways of knowing and being do not fit — they are not big enough to make sense of the territory. They are The Old. The new is The New.

The creative consciousness is the thing that fosters the accidental discoveries, and that fosters unintended breakthroughs that challenge conventional boundaries. The creative consciousness is a catalyst for organic evolution within any effort for which uncertainty looms large.

When we embrace uncertainty, we open that new terrain, providing avenues for originality that rigid ideation frameworks often obscure.

This episode of the podcast gets into the sometimes painful but always fascinating struggle by which we try to maintain the creative spirit in an increasingly optimized world.

When the denizens of efficiency and productivity are the ones who set the rules, it can feel like a losing battle to keep the spark of innovation alive. But what if we flipped the script? What if we embraced the chaos, the messiness, and the unexpected as essential ingredients for creativity?

In this episode, I chat with the guys at ‘Normals,’ a creative studio that thrives on the unexpected, the illogical, and the beautifully tangentially inflected. They argue that true innovation isn’t about relentlessly pursuing efficiency, but about deliberately disrupting it – a vital conversation for anyone wrestling with the pressures of modern work.

This episode is a vital discussion for anyone who believes that the creative spirit is worth preserving, even in the face of relentless optimization. It’s a call to arms for those who feel that the relentless march of efficiency is stifling their creativity and and ultimately that thing we loosely call ‘innovation’ — the space where sense can be made out of chaos and confusion.

So have a listen as we have a coffee and chat. Come along and see how ‘Normals’ cultivates a creative environment built on embracing ambiguity, challenging assumptions, and ultimately, celebrating the power of human imagination to create something truly new.

I hope this episode serves as a reminder that sometimes the best solutions are found not in perfectly polished plans, but in delightfully messy explorations.

Very much like the editing of this podcast.

Oh, one last thing to say: this podcast, the newsletter, everything that goes on here is not free. It takes time and costs money.

If the podcast and the community have value to you, please consider supporting it.

There are three ways you can do that: first, is to become a professional tier supporter on Patreon. That’s easy. Just go over to Patreon and become a supporter.

The second way is to buy the books and zines over at the shop.

The third way is to hire me to work with you, your team or your organization. There are a multitude of shapes that can take, from workshops to commissioned projects to engaging me as a consultant.

You can find more about that over on the website in the services section or simply book a call with me.

The Intersection of Imagination, Science Fiction, Strategy and Creativity.

we wandered into something I keep circling back to: the idea that strategy is a kind of science fiction. Not in the “space battles and robots” sense, but in the deeper way that science fiction gives us permission to imagine futures—plausible or not—and then build toward them. Jarrett and I talked about design not just as a tool for solving problems, but as a mode of inquiry, a way of asking better questions and shaping new cultural narratives.

We both share this instinct that branding, design, and strategy aren’t just reactive—they’re speculative. They make bets on the kind of world a product or company wants to inhabit. They tell stories about futures that don’t exist yet, and then use those stories as scaffolding for action. That’s what excites me about this work: it's not just about “making things,” it's about materializing possibilities.

There's also this important undercurrent about imagination as a form of intelligence. We don’t talk enough about that. Creativity isn’t some whimsical add-on—it’s central to how organizations find direction, how they differentiate, how they respond to change. And good strategy? It needs to evoke, not just calculate.

This episode was a reminder that strategy and design, at their best, operate in the realm of the imaginary. They’re speculative tools. And maybe the real work is helping people see that imagination is infrastructure.

Jarrett Fuller is a designer, writer, educator, editor, and podcaster. He is an assistant professor of graphic design at North Carolina State University and hosts the design podcast Scratching the Surface.

https://jarrettfuller.com/

http://scratchingthesurface.fm/

In which Tobias and I converse about the release of the book 'Practices of Future Casting', the importance of events that gather thought leaders to spur creativity and career development in design and futures thinking, the compilation and production of the book, the value of speculative writing as a legitimate form of future making, the significance of in-person events for fostering impactful professional and creative relationships, the concept that imagination, like a muscle, must be exercised and integrated into both creative and professional contexts to drive meaningful change. We also ponder the challenge of replicating the studio environment digitally and stress that the embodied experience of shared physical spaces is vital for deep creative engagement.

Check out the book 'Practices of Future Casting': https://nearfuturelaboratory.com/library/2024/11/practices-of-futurecasting/

Check out our essay: https://nearfuturelaboratory.com/essays/2024/11/stories-to-imagine-alternate-futures/

Follow Tobias: https://tobiasrevell.com/

Support the podcast, join the community: https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory

Phil Balagtas' book "Making Futures Work" is a comprehensive map of the work of futuring.

https://www.philbalagtas.com/

Learn how to get started with Futures Thinking. With this practical guide, Phil Balagtas, founder of the Design Futures Initiative and the global Speculative Futures network, shows you how designers and futurists have made futures work at companies such as Atari, IBM, Apple, Disney, Autodesk, Lufthansa, and McKinsey & Company.

This book demystifies the process of Futures Thinking into a language that's practical and useful for both designers and strategists. You'll learn about Strategic Foresight for using ideas about the future to anticipate and prepare for change; explore Speculative Design to deal with the relationship between science, technology, and humans; and Design Fiction to explore and critique possible futures.

Balagtas also shares stories from his journey to build a global community and describes how he works with clients to reshape the futures vocabulary. With this guide, you'll learn how to:

We discuss the challenges and triumphs of writing an all-encompassing book on futures practice, exploring the evolution of speculative design and the importance of imagination as a critical element in futures work. Phil shares his experiences from initial concept to publication, the personal and professional obstacles, and the intricate process of curating a methodologically rich and visually engaging text. We discuss the collaborative nature of futures work, the delicate balance of practicality and creativity, and the potential of immersive experiences to enhance learning and engagement in futures studies. Imagination, much like a muscle, needs to be exercised and nurtured through diverse techniques and collaborative efforts.

Please support the podcast by becoming a Patron over on https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory which also gets you access to the Near Future Laboratory Discord server, a vibrant hub of engaged, thoughtful, creative generalists oriented towards creating more habitable near future worlds.

Please become a paid supporter over on Patreon. Your support helps keep the Podcast going and gets you membership in the Near Future Laboratory community on Discord.

A conversation with Troy Campbell who describes his journey from graduate school to becoming a professor and the Chief Scientist at On Your Feet, where he became passionate about the power of behavioral science.We talk about concepts like identity, memory, and mindset activation, and how they can be utilized across consumer, organizational, and personal contexts. Troy talks about how he fuses behavioral science with artistic practices like storytelling and applied improvisation. We also get into specific methods, such as using portals for easing transitions when imagining into possible futures, the kinds of warm-up activities that help foster creativity, and the importance of grounding ideas, understanding imperfections, and leveraging narrative to communicate effectively. Throughout we wonder about the interlinks between structured approaches and expansive creative exploration and how these in the right proportions can achieve meaningful, impactful, and wonderfully unexpected (innovative) outcomes.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-hiduke-campbell/

https://www.hidukehouse.com/