In Materializing the Invisible, we considered invisible and intangible phenomena—the systems, constructs, relationships, infrastructures, backends and other entities, physical and conceptual, which comprise or influence much of our experience of, and interaction with, environments both physical and digital. ‘The invisible’ here is potentially everything from […]
Exploring Qualitative Displays and Interfaces
by Dan Lockton, Delanie Ricketts, Shruti Aditya Chowdhury (Imaginaries Lab, Carnegie Mellon School of Design) and Chang Hee Lee (Royal College of Art) Much of how we construct meaning in the real world is qualitative rather than quantitative. We think and act in response to, […]
Thinking About Things That Think About How We Think
We often hear the phrase ‘intelligent environments’ used to describe spaces in which technology is embedded, in the form of sensors, displays, and computational ability. This might be related to Internet of Things, conversational interfaces or emerging forms of artificial intelligence. But what does ‘intelligence’ […]
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, from Brexit to Trump, have been a vivid demonstration for our […]
Electric Acoustic: Exploring energy as a design material through sonic and vibration displays
Shengzhi Wu, Gray Crawford, Devika Singh, and Dan Lockton, 2017–18 Funded by the CMU College of Fine Arts’ Fund for Research & Creativity, and using data provided by CMU Facilities Management Services. Read our CHI 2019 Late-Breaking Work paper Lockton, D., Crawford, G., Singh, D., […]
Materializing mental health through design: using creative thinking for #worldmentalhealthday
Can design help people think about and express their own mental health? Four ongoing projects from students in the Imaginaries Lab studio New Ways to Think, in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, are exploring creative ways for us to describe, talk about, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 imagine. More details on the toolkit here, including a great […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]