My fascination with imagination began at the dinner table when I was a child.
My mother worked in intellectual property. Every evening at dinner, she would tell me about the inventions she was working on. One day it was a new appliance. The next, a medical device. Another day, something so unfamiliar I could not even guess what it was for.
At the time, I only half understood what I was hearing. But something stayed with me: somewhere in the world, people were seriously thinking about things that did not yet exist, and trying to bring them into reality.
My mother also gave me a habit that shaped me in a lasting way. If I asked three questions in a day, I earned one chance to draw a prize. She would take me to a store and let me choose something I liked.
The questions could be about anything. Why does this work the way it does? What would happen if it worked differently? What is the connection between this and that?
I no longer remember what the prizes were. What I remember is struggling at first to come up with three questions every day. Then, gradually, it became natural. I learned how to notice problems, follow clues, and connect seemingly unrelated things. It felt like a treasure hunt. Eventually, it became part of who I am.
Carrying the thought that I wanted to create something new myself, I chose to study electronic engineering. But once I entered university, I soon realized that what truly drew me in was not engineering itself, but the act of imagining. Could there be a new way to solve this problem? If a different possibility became real, what kind of world would it create?
In an engineering context, that kind of thinking often gets dismissed as impractical. They did not always fit. But I did not want to let them go, so I started looking for a place that could hold them.
Industrial design, product design, architecture, interactive installations — what looked like restlessness was really a search. For a language open enough to take those ideas seriously without forcing them into a single form.
The summer before my MFA at Parsons, I read Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. I still remember that feeling. It was as if someone had finally articulated what I had always sensed but could never fully name: imagining a world that does not yet exist is not an escape from reality. It is a way of understanding reality, and a way of intervening in it.
Since then, I have worked on personal projects and client work with brands, institutions, and teams. The formats have changed, but the underlying logic has remained the same: turning vague perception into direction, and turning imagination into something other people can step into.
At a certain point, I realized I had accumulated something meaningful. Whenever I shared my work, people kept asking the same questions. Those questions made me see that the ways of working I had come to take for granted held value for others. How to find direction inside ambiguity? How to make judgments when no precedent exists? A finished piece of work shows the result, not the path. It can't quite teach how to think.
So I began to reflect on what I had learned into methods that could travel, so that more people could use. Because I believe this kind of thinking only reveals its full value when it gets used, tested, and refined inside real situations.
And while I was doing this, the world itself was changing.
Almost everyone started talking about AI and using AI. It could accelerate execution, increase output, and optimize workflows. But it rarely reached the deeper layers: how judgment is formed, how insight accumulates, where a team's sense of direction comes from.
There are more tools than ever, but no one feels more at ease. The old way of working is breaking. The new one isn't built yet.
That made me start to think: what we're missing isn't a better tool. It's a new way of thinking and creating.
Actual Fiction was built in that gap.
Actual: real, grounded, possible to practice.
Fiction: not yet existing, still being imagined.
The new possibilities live where these two meet.
Working at that intersection is what Actual Fiction is for — both an exploration and an invitation.
An invitation to bring back our imagination.
To see possibility before acting.
To keep asking, seriously:
What else could the world be?