Episode 076 is a discussion with Jan Rod and Kenta Kondo from IDEO Tokyo sharing their Project Inari in which created a sushi box as Design Fiction artifact. They collectively imagined a future that considers and reflects upon sustainable harvesting and issues of food security. It is a public project that also served to allow IDEO to explore how Design Fiction can be brought to bear to help clients make sense of their possible futures, whether food futures or any other topic.

Chesterbot 🤖 Says 👇🏽

"confidence": 0.9519705766608136

IDEO designers Jan Rod and Kenta Kondo in Tokyo created a fictional sushi box to explore food security. They made an uncanny metal box resembling disposable supermarket packaging. Inside were sushi pieces they crafted. Details like powdered condiments provoked questions about the fictional 2027 world. Through workshops, the box aligned perspectives on food systems. It activated imagination beyond abstract concepts.

"question": "What was the main purpose of this conversation?",

"answer": "The main purpose of this conversation was to discuss how design fiction and props like the fictional sushi box can help organizations explore potential future problems and spark imagination and alignment among diverse stakeholders. The guests spoke about their experience using a fictional sushi box prop in workshops to get participants to think about future challenges around food systems."

"question": How does the topic help people imagine more thoroughly the contingencies and challenges to be faced in the future?

"answer": The topic of using design fiction and props helps people imagine future challenges and contingencies more thoroughly in the following ways:

- The fictional sushi box created a tangible artifact that participants could examine and discuss. This helped ground the speculation in a concrete object.

- The highly detailed prop packaging and labels sparked participants' imaginations about how future food systems might evolve.

- The familiarity of sushi helped participants project their thinking into the future starting from something they knew.

- The prop provided a shared reference point for workshop participants from different backgrounds to discuss future implications.

"question": "What are five key take-aways from this presentation?",

"answer": "Five key take-aways from this presentation are:

1. Design fiction uses props and artifacts to help imagine future scenarios, not propose solutions.

2. Tangible props can align stakeholders by creating a shared object to spark discussion.

3. Design fiction aims to explore future problems worth solving, not just extrapolate the past.

4. Making design fiction practices mainstream involves connecting them to company innovation processes.

5. Detailed props provoke questions about future contingencies and implications."

"question": "What's a good summary of this conversation that can be used to post and share in an email?",

"answer": "The Near Future Laboratory podcast featured IDEO designers discussing how they used a fictional highly detailed sushi box prop in workshops to spark participants' imagination about future food system challenges. The prop packaging and mock sushi helped ground the speculation and align diverse stakeholders in the discussion."

"question": "What's a good summary of this conversation that can be used to as an engaging exciting way to get people excited to listen to the podcast?"

"answer": "Hear how IDEO designers created a fictional sushi box prop to take workshop participants on a imaginative deep dive into future food system contingencies and innovations!"

A new show. Last Week from the Near Future — a summary of some interesting things that came through and around the Near Future Laboratory Discord.

1. The Imagine Harder Summit (Detroit, Sept. 22/23, 2023)

This Episode is a rebroadcast of Episode 030 with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, preceded and amended with various explications and questions posed to the Chesterbot container of the conversation's semantics.

**Speculative Design Practice**

Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby's design practice has evolved over time. Initially focused on conceptual models, they now also create prototypes. They find models give more creative freedom. Their work with complex technologies like biotech led them to embrace fiction and modeling. The term 'speculative design' emerged from their critical design work engaging science and tech. They value fiction for its own sake, not just for discussing the future or selling concepts.

**Teaching Speculative Design** Dunne and Raby direct the Design Reality Studio at Parsons, teaching posthumanism, quantum theory and designed realities. They collaborate with faculty and choose their own research. They are writing a book on new ideas and approaches in design.

**Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration** Dunne, Raby and Bleecker value letting disciplines interact in surprising ways while retaining disciplinary roots. Bleecker proposes a 'general seminar' where diverse people make sense of ideas together, as Dunne and Raby have long practiced. They hope design, science, tech and industry collaborate more, though science and tech currently do so more than design. **Representing Imagined Futures** They aim to represent imagined futures expanding beyond the typical narrow range. They explore 'impossible objects' and how constraints limit collective imagination. **Recognition and Validation** Dunne and Raby were delighted to receive the Royal Designers for Industry award, valuing its recognition of their trajectory, not just current work. They appreciate the range of practices recognized. Bleecker sees it as validating their creative practice.

Sascha Poflepp was a German artist, collaborator, and friend. We dedicated The Manual of Design Fiction to him. It's important not to forget his contributions to creative thinking and making. In that spirit, I managed to extract the audio tape from a panel I organized at SxSW back in 2010 on the topic of Design Fiction in which Sascha contributed a remarkably clear and cogent perspective through his own work.

Also contributing to the panel were Stuart Candy, Jake Dunagen, Jennifer Leonard, Bruce Sterling, and myself.

You can see Sasha's slides cued to his presentation here: https://youtu.be/XDp_TsKqk3o

Lila Feldman is a designer based in NYC. She received her BA in 3D Design: Product + Furniture from Northumbria University and her MFA in Design + Technology from Parsons School of Design.

https://lilafeldman.com/

Lila and I discussed finding purpose in creative practice and how creativity, imagination, and a futures-oriented mindset can help reinvigorate the potential for bringing about meaningful change through individual as well as team-based design practices.

If you want to hear more of these types of conversations, become a Patron over at https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory.

If you want to read more about creative practice and the approach I use here at Near Future Laboratory, check out all the books and artifacts from the future over at https://shop.nearfuturelaboratory.com, especially "The Manual of Design Fiction" and my follow-on book just released the other day, "It's Time To Imagine Harder: The Reader's Guide To The Manual of Design Fiction". (Plus there's the 10th Anniversary printing of a rejuvinated "TBD Catalog" — the product catalog from the future.

Thanks for listening!

_Julian

If you're curious to hear about what it takes to dream into, create, build, grow, maintain an independent creative studio and practice, you'll want to listen to this conversation with Che-Wei Wang and myself. We talk about the importance of creativity and how it can be used to create meaningful change, and the need for a balance between creativity and structure and how to create an environment that fosters collaboration.

https://cwandt.com

If you want to hear more of these types of conversations, become a Patron over at https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory.

If you want to read more about creative practice and the approach I use here at Near Future Laboratory, check out all the books and artifacts from the future over at https://shop.nearfuturelaboratory.com, especially "The Manual of Design Fiction" and my follow-on book just released the other day, "It's Time To Imagine Harder: The Reader's Guide To The Manual of Design Fiction". (Plus there's the 10th Anniversary printing of a rejuvinated "TBD Catalog" — the product catalog from the future.

Thanks for listening!

_Julian

This episode is a conversation with writer and noted architecture critic Geoff Manaugh, who has written for the The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times Magazine, New Scientist, Cabinet Magazine, The Daily Beast, Wired UK amongst many other publications.

He also co-authored with Nicola Twilley the book ‘Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, and A Burglar’s Guide to the City on the relationship between crime and architecture. And most recently, a ghost story he wrote called ‘Ernest’ back in 2017 was adapted for film and recently released on Netflix under the title ‘We Have A Ghost’, which was beautiful and fun and clever and I recommend you watch it after listening to this episode.

Don't forget to like, write a review and share the podcast amongst your friends and colleagues, and support the podcast on https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory

Find all of our artifacts from the future, including 'The Manual of Design Fiction' over at https://shop.nearfuturelaboratory.com

Thank you for listening!

Juliana Schneider is a trend researcher, futures designer and creative strategist with diverse and extensive experience in the creative industry. She helps people and businesses make sense of the world around them and build stories and strategies that inspire us to engage with the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

https://julianajschneider.com/

Please support the podcast over at https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory and don't forget to pick up your copy of The Manual of Design Fiction, now in its second printing. Published fiercely independently by Near Future Laboratory.

http://shop.nearfuturelaboratory.com

Thank you!

Dr Delfina Fantini van Ditmar is a biologist, design researcher and Senior Lecturer. Her practice is concerned with ecological thinking, reflective practices, epistemological paradigms and alternative futures.

https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/dr-delfina-fantini-van-ditmar/

Please support the podcast over at https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory

Thank you!

_ Julian

This is a digest of General Seminar S04E01 where Drew Wiberg, Kempe Scanlan and I took about 30 folks into the Futures of Fashion had a look around, and we brought back some Design Fiction artifacts from that future to share with you!

General Seminar is the platform I created for sense-making against the beautiful confusion of all the new 'futuristic' things we confront seemingly every day. So in General Seminar we take on these topics, with none of the hubris that one puts on to try and 'predict' the future, and wander around to see what we see and reflect on the way the world is becoming. I've boiled down 90 minutes to about 45 to give you a sense of some corners of the conversation.

If you want to find out more about General Seminar and all the other things going on over at the Near Future Laboratory join our email list: https://tinyurl.com/nfl-newsletter.

And don't forget — please support the podcast and all the things over at https://patreon.com/nearfuturelaboratory. Your support would be very much appreciated.