- This is the notebook for The Near Future Laboratory, a design-to-think collaborative studio that combines insight and analysis with design and research with rapid prototyping to create potent provocative sometimes preposterous ideas into material form. We’re a think/make design & research network focusing on digital interaction designs based on "weak signals" from the fringes of digital culture, where the near-future already exists. We turn those weak signals into material form by rapidly constructing prototypes of innovative designs for near-future concepts.
We focus on creating implications and provocations well beyond the commercial mainstream. There is nothing here for sale and most of these things make little sense in a normal, for-profit context. We are not a corporation, or patent-wielding design studio. We work from our instincts, self-commissioning ourselves with our time, personal finances, and human sweat to do what we feel needs to be done. Our stories about the Near Future come from our imaginations, materialized as physical explanations and conversations pieces. We are not for our own profit, nor anyone else’s.
Our goal is to understand how imaginations become materialized through various strategies and approaches and thereby swerve the present into new, more habitable near future worlds. We are a loose network of near future scouts dispersed hither and yon. Our conversations happen in between ourselves and our federated human & non-human collaborators.
We recently dispersed an essay capturing many of our interests and approaches to thinking about how to remake the world called “Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction”. More publications can be found here.
Contact Us Send an email to julian [at] nearfuturelaboratory [dot] com or nicolas [at] nearfuturelaboratory [dot] com or fabien [at] nearfuturelaboratory [dot] com.