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 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 […]