All posts filed under “Future”

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 fraught, too difficult. You’ve […]

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 […]

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. […]

As we may understand: A constructionist approach to ‘behaviour change’ and the Internet of Things
In a world of increasingly complex systems, we could enable social and environmental behaviour change by using IoT-type technologies for practical co-creation and constructionist public engagement. [This article is cross-posted to Medium, where there are some very useful notes attached by readers] We’re heading into […]

Persuasion for peace
Influencing individual people’s behaviour often seems to be about mundane or trivial things, such as choosing one type of magazine subscription over another, or using less shower gel in a hotel bathroom. But if we’re honest, it’s only in aggregate that behaviour change is going […]

‘Smart meters’: some thoughts from a design point of view
Here’s my (rather verbose) response to the three most design-related questions in DECC’s smart meter consultation that I mentioned earlier today. Please do get involved in the discussion that Jamie Young’s started on the Design & Behaviour group and on his blog at the RSA. […]

frog design on Design with Intent
Robert Fabricant of frog design — with whom I had a great discussion a couple of weeks ago in London — has an insightful new article up at frog’s Design Mind, titled, oddly enough, ‘Design with Intent: how designers can influence behaviour’ — which tackles […]

The Hacker’s Amendment
Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes. From Artraze commenting on this Slashdot […]

Stuff that matters: Unpicking the pyramid
Most things are unnecessary. Most products, most consumption, most politics, most writing, most research, most jobs, most beliefs even, just aren’t useful, for some scope of ‘useful’. I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but most of our civilisation seems to […]

On ‘Design and Behaviour’ this week: Do you own your stuff? And a strange council-run ‘Virtual World for young people’
GPS-aided repo and product-service systems Ryan Calo of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society brought up the new phenomenon of GPS-aided car repossession and the implications for the concepts of property and privacy: A group of car dealers in Oregon apparently attached GPS devices to […]

Richard Thaler at the RSA
Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge (which is extremely relevant to the Design with Intent research), gave a talk at the RSA in London today, and, though only mentioned briefly, he clearly drew the links between design and behaviour change. Some notes/quotes I scribbled down:

Designing Safe Living
Lancaster University’s interdisciplinary Institute for Advanced Studies (no, not that one) has been running a research programme, New Sciences of Protection, culminating in a conference, Designing Safe Living, on 10-12 July, “investigat[ing] ‘protection’ at the intersections of security, sciences, technologies, markets and design.” The keynote […]

The world’s energy meter
One of the presentations I’m really looking forward to at OpenTech 2008 in London is by AMEE, self-described as “The world’s energy meter”: If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build? The Climate Change agenda has created an imperative […]