Oneiric Lab
Alija Blackwell is an award-winning innovator and the founder of Oneiric Lab, a strategic foresight and immersive design consultancy. By using speculative design and scenario building, Alija brings to life pathways to desirable futures through engaging the public imagination. Alija's work in the social impact sector has spanned across arts institutions, academia, policy think tanks, foundations, governments, nonprofits, and NGOs.
awards & fellowships
of playlists for Digital & Climate Movements
of illustrations for art exhibits & graphic recording
certifications in migration, digital media, foresight, cybersecurity & data science
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My Offerings.
Through needs assessments and data-driven systems evaluations, Oneiric Lab builds the capacity for strategic decision-making over long-term time horizons. By determining organizational objectives and alignment on shared visions, Oneiric Lab has guided governing boards, community leaders, and directors with resource planning, development, and communications campaigns to achieve their goals. Using the power of narrative design, Oneiric Lab has helped bolster support towards desirable futures.
Emerging technologies and traditional creative mediums drive Oneiric Lab's immersive design practice. Through projection mapping, augmented reality, and game design Oneiric Lab engages with innovative technology to create experiential futures. Speculative writing and zines also provide pathways to construct new possibilities for communities to bring to life their vision and potential for social impact.
Art, science, technology, and psychology are infused in the design of artefacts from the futures. Art can expand the capacity for public imagination and provoke change through providing a vision to work towards in the present. By helping organizations and communities acknowledge that the future is something that we are constantly constructing in the present, Oneiric Lab co-creates a vehicle to achieve ideal realities.
After a landscape analysis to understand the state of the field and influential factors across sectors, Oneiric Lab develops scenarios using archetypes of change to drive futures storytelling. These scenarios are rooted in emerging trends and data driven forecasts to chart pathways to possible futures and understand the cost of present day actions or inactions.
By centering the lived expertise of directly impacted communities alongside the domain knowledge of subject matter experts, Oneiric Lab leads groundbreaking research rooted in multilateral analyses. Through ethnographic methodologies including interviews, focus groups, and workshops, Oneiric Lab develops an inclusive process to ensure communities and stakeholders closest to the subject matter have their visions reflected in the outcome. From ideation to implementation, evaluation, and collective sense-making frontline communities are centered.
Tech.
Advancing Students' Digital Rights is a multimedia policy toolkit fostering inclusive data sovereignty across school communities, edtech developers, and education departments.
Enchantedland is an augmented reality game that teaches students how to use foresight strategies to stay safe online and combat misinformation through data protection and self-sovereign identity frameworks.
Build Early Ed is an award-winning mobile application that connects New Mexicans to opportunities in early childhood education through Head Start enrollment, workforce development, and wrap-around family support services.
Algorithms of Late Capitalism is a zine co-created with the Internet Teapot and Mozilla Festival in March 2021 to explore possible futures of artificial intelligence.
Art.
2022 Afrofuturism Festival Artist
Virtual reality installation exploring youth digital rights and the extractive data practices children are exposed to on big tech platforms.
AI for Intergenerational Healing was a speculative design workshop exploring restorative use cases of artificial intelligence using generative interactive art and foresight strategies.
Live immersive experience developer using projection mapping and augmented reality to bring to life emerging music artists' episodic visual albums.
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Dreams of the Futures.
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February 2023
Spring 2023