All posts filed under “Design”
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: 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 […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
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 […]
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., […]
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
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 […]
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 […]
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
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
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: […]
How do actual designers use academic literature?
The whole point of doing research is to extract reliable knowledge from either the natural or artificial world, and to make that knowledge available to others in re-usable form. Nigel Cross, ‘Design Research: A Disciplined Conversation’, Design Issues 15(2), 1999, p.9 [PDF link] >>>Link to […]