Actual Fiction is an independent practice that helps organizations find direction in AI, then build on it.

When I was a child, my mother worked in intellectual property. Every evening she would tell me about inventions she was reviewing — appliances, medical devices, things I could not even name. I only half understood, but something stayed: somewhere, people were seriously thinking about things that did not yet exist.

She also gave me a rule. Three questions a day earned one small prize. The questions could be about anything. I struggled at first. Then it became natural — noticing problems, following clues, connecting things that seemed unrelated. Eventually it became part of how I think.

I studied engineering, then moved through industrial design, architecture, and interactive media. What looked like restlessness was a search for a language wide enough to take speculative thinking seriously. I found it in the summer before Parsons, reading Speculative Everything by Dunne and Raby — the recognition that imagining what does not yet exist is not an escape from reality but a way of intervening in it.

Over the next decade I worked with brands, institutions, and creative teams. The formats changed constantly; the underlying work stayed the same: turning ambiguity into direction, and direction into something others could act on. At some point I realized the ways of working I took for granted held real value for others — how to find clarity when no precedent exists, how to make judgment calls in new territory.

Then AI changed the landscape. Execution got faster, but the deeper layers — how judgment forms, how direction gets set, where a team's sense of possibility comes from — remained untouched. More tools than ever, but no one feeling more oriented.

Actual Fiction was built in that gap. Actual: real, grounded, possible to practice. Fiction: not yet existing, still being imagined. The work lives where these two meet.