Imagine browsing an IKEA catalogue — the one that arrives by post or online. Product codes, prices, essential descriptions, photos of domestic settings. Now imagine every product in that catalogue comes from a plausible future: a fridge that buys food autonomously, a chair that adapts to your mood, an urban flood survival kit. This is the future catalogue.
Julian Bleecker of the Near Future Laboratory developed the "Design Fiction Product Catalogue" method from a simple insight: commercial catalogues are among the most familiar documents of contemporary capitalism. We know how to read them instinctively. Using that format for speculative objects creates a powerful effect — the future does not seem like a distant work of art, it seems like something you could order tomorrow.
The TBD Catalog ("To Be Determined") is the best-known example: a catalogue of products whose future is still "to be determined". Objects presented with the same mundanity as a toaster or a rug. The normality of the commercial tone makes what is being sold unsettling — because if a "Home Surveillance Drone for Children" has a product code and a price, someone might really want it.
The IKEA-style catalogue works because it builds a world through accumulation. Not a single provocative object, but dozens of products that together paint a society: what kind of family lives like this? What problems do these objects solve? What values do they assume as normal? Each page adds a piece to world-building without needing an explicit manifesto.
Creating a speculative catalogue is accessible to anyone. You need a template (catalogue layout, commercial typography), a list of 10-20 products coherent with a scenario, brief descriptions written as real copywriting, plausible prices and invented product codes. Photorealistic 3D renders are not required: illustrations, collages, photos of low-fi prototypes or even hand drawings can work — what matters is register consistency.
Future catalogues are powerful civic tools. In a workshop with citizens, administrators or entrepreneurs, browsing a catalogue generates concrete conversations: "would you buy this?", "who benefits?", "who pays the environmental cost?". They transform the abstract into imaginable decisions — and imaginable decisions are the first step towards action.