2021 — A Year In A List

FROM: The Near Future Laboratory

SUBJECT: 2021 — A Year In A List

The Near Future Laboratory isn’t a ‘normal’ organization by any means — we’re a distributed network of accomplished practitioners based in five different cities in California, Mexico, Switzerland and Spain.

We each have our own personal interests but come together through projects inspired by our curiosities, experiences, and expertise in design, engineering, anthropology and futures. It’s been an interesting year to say the least — we’ve collectively experienced rapid changes in society, culture and technology, alongside changes in our personal and work lives. As we look forward to 2022, here’s a bulleted list of what we got up to over the last twelve months.We wish you all a happy, healthy, and productively creative new year!

- Fabien, Isra, Julian, Nick and Nicolas

January

• Julian launches the Near Future Laboratory podcast with a pilot featuring Fabien and Nicolas exploring what it means to be a generalist. The archive now comprises 22 episodes.
• Nicolas releases his new book co-edited with Disnovation “A Bestiary of the Anthropocene: On Hybrid Plants, Animals, Minerals, Fungi, and Other Specimens”
• The Design Fiction Newsletter is launched.
• Fabien releases a new version of próximo, an ​​online text editor with a ‘Map it’ button.

February

• Julian produces a piece of Design Fiction for his company OMATA — perhaps the world’s first Corporate Annual Report from the Future.
• Nicolas presents a Design Fiction 101 workshop at Politecnico in Milan (Italy).
• Nicolas starts a six-month visiting professorship at the Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva.
• Fabien starts his “travel around the near future in 50 maps” atlas project.

March

• The Near Future Laboratory Discord is launched (which now has over 500 members)
• Nicolas presents a short futures research project for the city of Lyon (France) about digital sovereignty.
• Nicolas releases his booklet “Investigation/Design” about design ethnographies
• Fabien posts the New Idioms from the Fringes of the Internet #30.

April

• Nick presents his ‘Everyday Futures’ keynote remotely to the IKEA Digital Days conference in Sweden.
• Fabien gives a talk on his work at the intersection of Design and AI at the School of Design at Politecnico in Milan.

May

• Julian launches General Seminar — a new platform that emphasizes the old fashioned seminar-style discussion as a way of sense making.
• Julian presents his ‘Design Fiction 101’ talk at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination
• Fabien presents his talk “Being Ambidextrous in Disciplines” at the ESNE Design School in Madrid.

June

• Nicolas completes a short futures research project for the city of Lyon (France) about the digital futures of sport.
• Nicolas and Disnovation launches an exhibit about the Bestiary of the Anthropocene at Théatre de l’Orangerie in Geneva.
• Nicolas and Disnovation are interviewed about the Bestiary by The Stoa.
• Nicolas presents a Design Fiction 101 online seminar at EGADE in Monterey (Mexico).
• Fabien presents his experiments with geospatial data at Geomobs and receives the best speaker’s prize.

July

• Nick and Julian finish putting together the deck for their first Hundredpixel TV project and start pitching it.
• Nick publishes a ‘taxonomy of futurists’.
• The city of Lyon publishes our 25 micro futures that question how technologies, nature and emerging practices might cohabit. A project led by Nicolas with Fabien and Isra.

August

• Fabien launches rumbo.world, an experiment to transform GPS trails into video recaps.

September

• Nicolas undertakes a futures research project for the city of Lyon (France) about digital manufacturing.
• Julian gives his Design Fiction 101 Seminar for Snap.
• Julian gives his Design Fiction 101 Seminar to UC Berkeley’s Masters of Design students.
• Julian gives his Design Fiction 101 to the core design team at Sonos.
• Nicolas contributes to the Paraboles ulx-56834 project/exhibit by Swiss studio Fragment.in in a church in Lausanne (Switzerland).
• Fabien and Isra complete the Near Future Laboratory contribution to the upcoming Museum of the Future in Dubai.
• Fabien becomes a father for the second time.

October

• Julian and IKEA create a Design Fiction for the IKEA Life at Home Report, synthesizing a year of field work, qualitative and quantitative research to represent possible futures of life at home.
• The Sens-Fiction exhibit about the relationship between design and fiction opens in Nantes (France). Nicolas is a member of the curating team.
• Nicolas presents a Design Fiction 101 online seminar at E-Art Hangzhou (China).
• We finished and produced the Design Fiction Work Kit 2021 — be sure to sign up on our email list and join the Near Future Laboratory Discord to find out when and how to get it!

November

• Nick is awarded the title Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts for his contributions to Futures Design.
• The Great Imagination exhibit opens in Madrid with our IKEA Catalog of the Near Future.
• Nicolas presents a short futures research project for the city of Lyon (France) about solarpunk.
• Nicolas hosts a design ethnography/fiction seminar at IRCAM (Paris)
• Isra facilitates a workshop about Design Fiction + virtual history at Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City)
• Julian facilitates a one-day Design Fiction workshop for a high-performance design team at the world’s largest company.

December

• We collectively finish writing Design Fiction: The Manual. Due for publication early 2022, Register your interest here.
• The fourteenth General Seminar of the year is held.
• The Near Future Lab Office Hours hosts its 93rd gathering
• The Geneva bureau launches dumptemp, a pop-up/nomadic hackerspace about discarded electronics and technotrash imaginaries.
• Isra joins a panel on climate change and futures thinking at Climate Story Lab (Mexico City)
• Julian facilitates a remote Design Fiction workshop with Pernod Ricard’s Futures Strategy team.
• The Bestiary of the Anthropocene is now available in Spanish thanks to Ediciones Menguantes.
• IKEA’s Life at Home Report published as a print magazine, including Design Fiction-based interviews, products, and advertisements.