About us
How we imagine affects how we understand the world, how we live, and what we see as possible in our collective futures, with consequences for sustainability, society, our relationships with technology, and our everyday lives.
At the Imaginaries Lab, we believe that humanity needs tools to enable new ways of understanding and imagining, and new ways to live, that provide more equitable socially and environmentally sustainable futures in an age of crises.
We use creative methods from design research to create those tools, to address the social and environmental challenges that humanity—and the planet—face, through projects and collaborations around climate futures and transitions, health and wellbeing, and new ways to work together. We’re based in Utrecht, Netherlands, but work internationally.
Working with Norwich University of the Arts (Institute for Sustainable Worlds) in the UK and partners including the Centre for Unusual Collaborations in the Netherlands (and previously Eindhoven University of Technology), the Imaginaries Lab is experimenting with a model at the intersection of design practice, education, and academic research. We aim to combine the best bits of a university context—a safe(r) environment for knowledge exploration, collaboration with motivated students, and access to research funding—with the dynamism and possibilities of real-world practice (and the challenges of real-world problems). This is the third phase of the lab’s journey: we started at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, from 2017–20, as a fully academic unit; then from 2021–23, based in Amsterdam and Utrecht, we have been primarily an independent publisher of the New Metaphors card deck; now, from 2024, we are attempting a more ambitious hybrid approach with our own studio in Utrecht (part of the Studio Ab community).
We’re open to consultancy, collaborations, developing and running tailored workshops and programmes, and many other things—please get in touch dan@imaginari.es or d.lockton@norwichuni.ac.uk
Our blog chronicles the work we are doing, with opportunities to be involved—you can also subscribe to our occasional newsletter for news of our activities.