J. Paul Neeley
Co-founder _ School of Critical Design
J. Paul is a London based designer and researcher with expertise in Speculative Design, Service Design, Design Research, and Strategy.
J. Paul is a London based Designer and Researcher.
He has a background in Service Design, Speculative Design, Design Research, and Strategy. J. Paul has worked professionally at Mayo Clinic's Center for Innovation as Service Designer & Researcher focusing on the healthcare experience and delivery, at Teton Radiology as Service Design Manager realizing innovative medical imaging solutions, and at Unilever in Consumer & Market Insights on brand development.
J. Paul's current design work explores the social, cultural, economic, and ethical implications of emerging technologies, designing speculative futures that help us engage with possibility as a way of reframing and understanding anew our current state. Recent projects have focused on happiness, healthcare and wellbeing, self quantification, future mobility, AI, synthetic biology, and issues of complexity and computational irreducibility in design and business.
J. Paul consults in Service & Speculative Design at Neeley Worldwide, is the founder of Masamichi Souzou, an organization working on the optimization of happiness through the consideration of everything, and he is the Co-founder & CEO of Yossarian, an AI for creativity. He is a tutor in Service Design at the Royal College of Art, and has guest lectured at Imperial College: Computer Science, London Business School, RCA: Design Interactions, NYU: ITP, Köln International School of Design, and SVA: Design for Social Innovation.
J. Paul holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art where he studied with Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby, and is a graduate of Northwestern University where he studied Communications Studies with a concentration in Economics. He is a cellist, and enjoys walking, chess, naps, beaches, and exploring ideas.
Find more of J. Paul Neeley’s work at jpaulneeley.com and neeleyworldwide.com.
What is Speculative Design?
Speculative Design is the design of future products and services to understand the impact and implications of emerging technology and social or cultural trends.
Speculative Design is a discipline that seeks to help us understand anew our current state by exploring futures possibilities.
Speculative Design is closely related to critical design, design futures, or design fiction, with these variations emerging from the particular focus, interest, or intent of the designer. Speculative Design disconnects design from the immediate needs of the business, industry, or the marketplace, and lets us use design to ask new kinds of questions, and create new kinds of value for the organization.
Speculative Design can enhance organizational decision making, by de-risking future possibilities, creating new context, and by generating empathy for future customers / citizens / employees / people / planet.
Speculative Design can work in research, strategy, product, service, and system contexts, in both innovation and development, and across various industries, both tech and non-tech focused.
Speculative Design is a radical expansion of purview, that reframes our current state options. By “closing the loop” we return from the explored future to a better understanding of product, investment, and research opportunities available to us today.
Speculative Design is in a normalizing phase of adoption, with companies and organizations training individuals, bringing the capabilities in house, and embedding futures practice into their process and decision making. We are dedicated to the acceleration of this normalization, giving individuals and organizations the tools and confidence to apply speculative design in their particular context and create new kinds of meaningful value.
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