A multidisciplinary group of thinkers, makers and near future speculators spent three days in Detroit to “do” science fiction: tangle up in fact and fiction and engage in curious crosstalk about the things that could be. The goal, then, was to Design Fiction and turn talk into deliberate actions and artifacts; to swerve the present by telling the story of a near future we imagine can be possible.

What we created — to spur conversations about the things that will matter in the near future — is a near future product catalog. For example, a SkyMall, or Sears Wish Book or McMaster-Carr catalog for the near future. Think of it as a near future science fiction sourcebook of products. It’s a collection of stuff , as if that collection of stuff existed as routinely as Sasquatch garden statuettes, inflatable neck pillows, combination USB thumb drive nail clipper laser pointers, battery-powered screwdrivers, allen wrench sets and flat tire repair kits.

TBD Catalog is meant to represent the materialization of conversations amongst a small group of designers, makers and writers. Into this catalog are things that express our sense of how the near future will be lived. It will express the pragmatic concerns, ambitions, fears, everyday needs and wishes of the future’s inhabitants as represented through the catalog’s contents — it’s diegetic prototypes.

To do this we considered the evolution of the ways and means of production of the near future, as well as shifts in the dynamics of creativity, law, aesthetic norms and values and incumbent measures of cultural achievement. TBD Catalog contains these Design Fiction products and things and services and present them as they would be when they become normal and everyday — even boring and mundane.