All posts filed under “Design

Thinking about Maintenance

Thinking about Maintenance

What comes to your mind if we talk about maintenance? As Naomi Turner points out, the pandemic has in some ways made what was often “invisible” labour much more visible: people’s care for—and repair of—the systems around us (and each other) has been central to […]

Sleep Ecologies

Sleep Ecologies

Sleep Ecologies: Tools for Snoozy Autoethnography (DIS 2020) from imaginaries on Vimeo. Sleep Ecologies, supported by Philips, explored how designed tools for autoethnographic inquiry could help people understand their own sleep health, and the wider wellbeing and lifestyle ‘ecologies’ around it. Taking student sleep as […]

Climate Pathways: Exhibition, November 22–23

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 […]

Imaginaries Lab review of the year: 2018

Imaginaries Lab review of the year: 2018

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 to do much more […]

Play Lab: Exploring Ambiguity

Play Lab: Exploring Ambiguity

The ‘Time-Traveling Hipster’ (1941) Carnegie Mellon School of Design, Senior Design Labs, Fall 2016, 51—401 Final projects: see cmuplaylab.com Discussion of the final projects Updated: December 21, 2016: Please note: this syllabus has been updated over the semester and rewritten into a kind of ‘review’ of what happened. […]

Two-faced: Looking back and forwards

Two-faced: Looking back and forwards

Thanks everyone who’s helped and been supportive in 2015. It’s been a busy year and I barely stopped to think about a lot of very important things, but spent too long thinking about other things which in retrospect probably aren’t so important. I’m sure that’s […]

Let’s See What We Can Do: Designing Agency

Let’s See What We Can Do: Designing Agency

‘What does energy look like?’ drawn by Zhengni Li, participant in Drawing Energy (Flora Bowden & Dan Lockton) How can we invert ‘design for behaviour change’ and apply it from below, enabling people to understand, act within, and change the behaviour of the systems of […]

Tools for ideation and problem solving: Part 1

Tools for ideation and problem solving: Part 1

   Back in the darkest days of my PhD, I started blogging extracts from the thesis as it was being written, particularly the literature review. It helped keep me motivated when I was at a very low point, and seemed to be of interest to […]

Making it easy

Making it easy

I have a blog post up at Guardian Sustainable Business, looking essentially at what’s been referred to here previously as ‘enabling‘ behaviour change, specifically in the context of sustainability.

Designers, literature, abstracts and Concretes

Designers, literature, abstracts and Concretes

Last week, I put a quick survey online asking how actual designers make use of academic literature. It provoked some interesting discussion on Twitter as well as two great blog posts from Dr Nicola Combe and Clearleft’s Andy Budd exploring different aspects of the question: […]