GitHub's R&D lab bets on design engineers to read the future
Fortune Telling and Speculative Design
Maggie Appleton, a design engineer at GitHub Next, explains how the lab turns weak signals into working prototypes and then ships them to GitHub — Copilot, Spark, Workspaces and Agentic Workflows all started this way. She argues design engineers are ideal fortune tellers: they can build convincing prototypes of future theories and now lean on agents to fill in the backend. She offers six practical tools, starting with the futures cone and weak signals.
We can't just give up and opt out because things are moving too fast. We need to engage, think like fortune tellers and try to read the crystal ball.