The Imaginaries Lab is a new research group based within Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. Founded in early 2017 by Dan Lockton, we are building on work around design for behavior change, mental models, and understanding, to explore questions around how the ways in […]
Imaginaries Lab 2021 Review
Imaginaries Lab 2021 Review This is a re-post of the Imaginaries Lab newsletter (subscribe here) It’s been too long since the last newsletter, back in those days before “all of this”. I didn’t even do one in 2020—the end of that year was just too […]
What did we do in 2019? Imaginaries Lab end-of-year review
What did we do in 2019? Imaginaries Lab end-of-year review New Metaphors First, some big news: we’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign for the New Metaphors toolkit. Please help us bring the project to fruition—get your own pack, and start generating new ways to think and […]
Climate Pathways: Exhibition, November 22–23
We’d like to invite you to Climate Pathways, an exhibition of projects from the Imaginaries Lab‘s fall 2019 studio elective at Carnegie Mellon, Research Through Design. Download the catalog of projects Friday November 22, 5.30pm–7.30pm: Exhibition opening and project demos Saturday November 23, 10.00am–5.00pm: Exhibition […]
New elective course for Fall 2019: 51-471/771 Research Through Design
51471 / 51771 Design Center: Imaginaries Lab: Research through Design The Imaginaries Lab is a research studio developing design methods to explore and support people’s imagining—both new ways to understand, and new ways to live, in an increasingly complex world. One aim is to develop […]
Imaginaries Lab 2018 Review
Imaginaries Lab 2018 Review It’s the end of December, which means it’s time for an update. Here at the Imaginaries Lab we’re just completing our second year, currently based within Carnegie Mellon School of Design. We’re a pretty part-time lab at present, but have aims […]
Service Fictions, Vocabularies for Visions, and Designing for Transitions: Imaginaries Lab at DRS 2018
Service Fictions, Vocabularies for Visions, and Designing for Transitions: Imaginaries Lab at DRS 2018 The Design Research Society conference—in 2018 taking place in Limerick, Ireland—is one of the largest events for the international academic design research community. The Imaginaries Lab is well represented, with roles […]
Fictions Matter Too…
Fictions Matter Too: A Vision for an Imaginaries Lab in Design “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” William Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, 1928 — later named as the ‘Thomas Theorem’ The events of the last couple of years, […]
Exploring Qualitative Interfaces at CHI
Our first tentative exploration of qualitative interfaces is being presented as late-breaking work this week at CHI 2017, the ACM conference on human factors in computing systems, in Denver, Colorado. We’ve turned the ‘extended abstract’ into a blog post here. Dan Lockton, Delanie Ricketts, Shruti […]
Design Students Explore Landscape Metaphors for Project Modeling
Design Students Explore Landscape Metaphors for Project Modeling Delanie Ricketts and Dan Lockton This article originally appeared on the Carnegie Mellon School of Design website We often use landscapes as metaphors in everyday speech, particularly to talk about complex systems—understanding a complex information system as […]
