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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
Guest post at Ethnography Matters
Over at the excellent Ethnography Matters we have an invited guest post about SusLab, explaining the RCA’s work on the project so far through from an ethnographic perspective. From the conclusion: …we hope to demonstrate, in the context of the wider political, academic and commercial debate over energy and behaviour change, what it means to […]
Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research: DRS 2014 Workshop, 15 June 2014
On 15 June, at the 2014 Design Research Society conference in Umeå, Sweden, we will be running a workshop on Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research along with SusLab project colleagues from Chalmers University of Technology and the Wuppertal Institute. This full-day workshop should be of interest to designers and researchers working at intersections […]
Work in progress: Ambient audible energy data
The three instruments you hear here represent the electricity use of three items of office infrastructure – the kettle, a laser printer, and a gang socket for a row of desks – in the Helen Hamlyn Centre office over 12 hours from midnight on a […]
Introducing Powerchord (Blackbird edition)
Powerchord 1, housed in a Poundland lunchbox. In the video, you see a laptop (~40W) being plugged in, with, from 10 seconds, the Powerchord kicking in with relatively gentle blackbird song. (The initial very quiet birdsong at 4-8 seconds is actual blackbirds singing in the […]
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 […]
Introducing The Story Machine: Part 1
Friction in integrating digital storytelling into community activities For some community groups, the use of technology and digital media is built into the work they do—for example, the Wards Corner Community Coalition‘s very successful use of Stickyworld and social media to tell their story, integrated into the organisation of a whole range of community events. […]
Introducing The Story Machine: Part 2
Co-creation of the Story Machine In Part 1, we discussed some of the challenges and ‘process friction’ in integrating digital storytelling into community activities, and introduced our initial work with The Mill, a community centre in Walthamstow, east London, which provides space and resources for local creative citizens to organise groups, events and activities. The […]