What if we could design a methodology to commercialize ingenuity?
The Next Chapter is an experimental initiative that converges the potential of idealist design with the power of capitalism to help brilliant ideas find traction.
Strategic design, applied towards ideal futures.

  • In a risk-averse sector, Utilidata’s team of utility experts, engineers, data scientists, policy experts, and technologists were promising a radical new solution, but navigating fundraising and business development proved challenging. 

    We collaborated with Utilidata leadership to navigate a growth strategy that included series B fundraising, welcoming an Advisory Board, mapping  early lighthouse partners and pilots, clarifying a USP, product naming and storytelling, thought leadership presentations, IIJA contract negotiations, and brand identity evolution.

  • Rhode Island’s Startup Ecosystem had been overshadowed by Boston and New York for decades, struggling for recognition, investment, and growth.

    We led a perspective of how RI stakeholders might catalyze a high growth startup ecosystem. Our solution was to set a vision for 2035 in which the state claimed $2B in startup investments, a number 12x higher than it was in 2023. Leveraging preferable futures enabled us to design a big initiative to galvanize stakeholders and map precisely how that future state could be achieved.

Our goal is to develop medium-agnostic strategies that imagine best-case outcomes for those working on behalf of humanity and our planet.
Our work explores how designing the conditions for commercialization enables an organization, initiative, technology, or an idea to achieve its apex—driving cultural, communal, and planetary change. 
Building communities around ambitious ideas.

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  • Idealist design is a systems-level strategy method that begins with a simple but radical move: define the ideal outcome first, then work backward to determine what must be true to make it real. Originating in the systems thinking work of Russell L. Ackoff and later advanced through interactive planning at Wharton, the method asks teams to temporarily suspend present-day constraints and imagine the most desirable, feasible version of their organization or ecosystem — as if it were being designed fresh today. Only after that ideal state is clearly described do constraints re-enter the conversation, as design variables rather than fixed limits. Historically used in large-scale innovation contexts such as Bell Labs’ telecommunications planning, idealist design shifts strategy from incremental optimization to condition creation. It treats the future not as something to predict, but something to architect — through deliberate choices in structure, incentives, narratives, partnerships, and experience.

TNC Reports explore the unbiased impact of societal, technological, environmental, economic, and political factors in areas with the greatest potential for change.

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Achieving "ideal" through collective action.
We start by imagining an ideal state five to ten years in the future, and then devise a series of conditions that must be met in order for that state to be achieved. From there, we leverage design as a tool to create the most ideal experience(s) within each condition. 

  • We identify the conditions that must exist for success to become likely.

    Conditions can be technical, social, market-based, narrative, operational, or relational. They are also designable; influenced via signals, experiences, partnerships, and proof.

  • Preferability is a lens focused on what future is worth building, backing, and aligning around. Its is a design criterion, not a prediction metric. It recognizes that markets — especially emerging ones — are shaped by coordinated belief and intentional signals as much as by trend lines. A preferable future is specific enough to guide decisions and attractive enough to mobilize partners, talent, and capital; creating directional coherence even in uncertainty.

Partners in strategy.
We are collective of researchers, strategists, designers, and technologists. Our practice is collaborative and multidisciplinary by necessity — allowing us to work with and across a range specialized industries and applications.

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Made better by design.
The world would be a different place if design was given credit not as a practice, but as a tool to be used on any number of problems. Imagine if every company had a Chief Design Officer. Or if we elected 
a Secretary of Design in local government. 

People whose job it is to think deeply with logic and empathy at the same time. To find universality while still appreciating nuance. To find beauty in the mundane and to improve solutions to problems we might not even realize we have.   

Because you can design anything: a chair, a cure, an intersection, an interaction, a menu, a meeting, a feeling. 

Design is a tool to imagine better, shared futures. Applied, it inspires new ways of living, and new futures to live in.

And we intend to do just that.