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In 2014, Dennis Bone, founding director of the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship at Montclair State University, told Jason he was about to hire someone Jason was going to love.
"Why?" Jason asked.
"He has rough hands. He's building his own boat by hand. You're going to love him."
"If that's why you think I'll love him, count me in."
That was all it took. Iain had been consulting with the Center since its launch; he joined the faculty soon after. We've been working together ever since — co-directing the MIX Lab at Montclair, and, in 2018, founding Emergent Futures Lab.
Two questions have driven everything we've made since:
The field research, the consulting work, the book, the newsletter, the community, the Academy — all of it has come from staying with those questions longer than was reasonable.
This page is the story of what's emerged from that.
We'd both been working on those questions for years before we met.
In the late 1980s in Vancouver, Iain was working in a thriving experimental art scene — dance, cinema, writing, music — and baking bread at a restaurant for income. A waiter loaned him a book by Stephen Jay Gould. The concept of exaptation — how unintended capacities become the engine of novelty — never left him. Three decades later, it's still at the center of how we work.
Iain spent the next twenty years co-running SPURSE, a boundary-blurring design collective working at the intersection of ecology, art, and emergent systems — projects from the high Arctic to inner-city neighborhoods in Bolivia. SPURSE's work appeared in the NYTimes, ID, Surface, and The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. The through-line: how do you make novel worlds possible.
Jason came at it from the building side. His career has been focused on operationalizing technology to improve how organizations do their work — developing early remote work infrastructure, pioneering digital video workflows, and sales / CRM software that transformed client relationships. The pattern across two decades was consistent: significant creative outcomes from limited resources. Constraint as the engine of invention, not its obstacle. Mid-career, higher education recruited him to help invent a new entrepreneurship and innovation program. He brought the first 3D Printing makerspace into a school of business — at the Feliciano Center, where the conversation about Iain's rough hands would happen a year later.
That's where we met. We've been at Montclair State, teaching and co-directing the MIX Lab, ever since.
We started Emergent Futures Lab in 2018 as a strategic innovation consulting firm.
The framing made sense. We had a method we'd been developing for decades. We had clients who wanted to work with us. A consultancy was the natural container.
In August 2020, we published the first volume of Emerging Futures alongside the launch of our book Innovating Emergent Futures — three decades of fieldwork synthesized into a coherent approach: four tasks, fifteen practices, the philosophical grounding, 185 hand-drawn diagrams. Diane Ragsdale, who directed the Creative Leadership MA at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, assigned the book as a required text for her course. Steven Greenstein, a STEM Innovation Professor at Montclair State, said he found bits of radical insight every time he opened it.
We took on engagements all across North America and Europe to deliver keynote talks, facilitate workshops, and week long inensives for organizations of every shape. The work was interesting. It was good. We could do it.
But the people we were working with kept asking us something we couldn't answer with another engagement.
How do I get more involved in this work?
People asked about coaching. Mentorship. One-on-one consulting and or consultuing for their organizations. We tried each of those. None of them fit — not the way the people asking wanted, and not the way we needed it to.
What they were asking for wasn't a service we could deliver to them. It was access to the inquiry itself: the dialogue across the newsletters, the practitioners using the framework in real time, the conversation that was already happening inside the work — and the fellow travelers they could sense were out there but hadn't met.
WorldMakers emerged as the answer. A global community of practice — designers, makers, facilitators, educators, consultants, researchers, leaders, and the perennially curious — collectively building a different relationship to creativity. Live events most weeks. Two podcasts. Embodied creativity exercises. Active dialogue threads. The book and the newsletter folded into something larger than either.
What started as a consulting firm became a community of practice. We let the work tell us what it needed to be.
That progression — staying with the unintended outcomes of our own practice long enough for them to make a world — is the practice we describe in the book. It would have been embarrassing to do otherwise. We try to live in the same way we ask anyone else to engage with creativity.
EFL today runs along two parallel paths.
The first is the community work: the Friday newsletter, now past 250 volumes; the book; and WorldMakers. This is where the inquiry into emergence, complexity, creativity, and worldmaking happens week by week — in long-form writing, two podcasts, weekly creativity exercises, live events, and the active dialogue between practitioners across five continents.
The second is the STEAM 3D Printing Academy — a fully online K-12 educator development program. It started in 2019 with a single in-person workshop for twenty New Jersey teachers, funded by Picatinny Arsenal. We've worked with Picatinny continuously ever since. In 2025 we redesigned the program from the ground up, moved it online, and built measurement infrastructure to track classroom impact at scale. The current cohort is 263 educators impacting over 30,000 students this year. Our K-12 colleague Andrew Harrison leads educator-experience design for the Academy — twenty years in classrooms gives him a fluency in how educators actually adopt new pedagogies. We're now opening Academy cohorts to additional funders for 2026–2027 and beyond. If you fund K-12 STEAM education, the impact our programs are having is detailed on the Academy page.
These look like two different products. They aren't.
Both paths start with the same two questions. Both proceed through making and doing. Both shift the question from What is it? to What can it do? — and then to What else can it do? Both build agency through open-ended challenges rather than step-by-step instructions. Both treat the teacher (or the facilitator, or the consultant) as someone whose job is to step back so the makers can lead.
A 6th-grade STEAM teacher whose students designed and printed a townscape is doing the same work as a WorldMakers member testing a new facilitation practice with a client. The medium is different. The pedagogical move is identical.
That's the thread we follow.
We don't have creativity figured out. We're not closer to a final answer than we were a decade ago — by some measures, we're further from one, because the questions - What is creativity? and How do you innovate? keep getting more interesting.
What we've built is a community of practice and a body of writing that takes those two questions seriously enough to keep working them collectively. The glossary — which includes exaptation, affordance, assemblage, worldmaking, enactive cognition, the transjective — is one expression of how the language has evolved. The 250+ newsletter volumes are another. The book is a third. WorldMakers is the fourth, and it's the one that's most alive — most responsive, most contested, most generative — because it's where the inquiry happens with other people who refuse to settle for the mythological version of creativity.
If you're new here, the newsletter is where most people start.
If you've been reading and want the approach laid out end-to-end, the book is the place.
If you've been around for a while and want to do this in active dialogue with others, WorldMakers is where you'll find the peers you've been looking for.
If you fund K-12 STEAM education and want to see what a six-year track record looks like in classroom evidence, the Academy page walks through it.
Wherever you come in, the questions are the same.
What is creativity?
How do you innovate?
