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 […]
All posts filed under “Interaction design”
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 […]
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., […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Code as control
In the earlier days of this blog, many of the posts were about code, in the Lawrence Lessig sense: the idea that the structure of software and the internet and the rules designed into these systems don’t just parallel the law (in a legal sense) […]
Report: Most people just trying to get by
Most people, for most of their day, are trying to get by. Every day is essentially a series of problems, some minor, some major, some requiring more thought than others. Some we care a lot about; some we wish we didn’t have to. Some are […]
CarbonCulture blog launch
It’s been quiet here, for reasons which will be explained later, but in the meantime I should mention that CarbonCulture (with whom I’ve been working for the past two years as part of the TSB-supported EMPOWER collaboration) has a new blog. In anticipation of the […]
If…
(introducing behavioural heuristics) EDIT (April 2013): An article based on the ideas in this post has now been published in the International Journal of Design – which is open-access, so it’s free to read/share. The article refines some of the ideas in this post, using […]
Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review
by Dan Lockton Continuing the meta-auto-behaviour-change effort started here, I’m publishing a few extracts from my PhD thesis as I write it up (mostly from the literature review, and before any rigorous editing) as blog posts over the next few months. The idea of how […]
dConstructing a workshop
A couple of weeks ago, at dConstruct 2011 in Brighton, 15 brave participants took part in my full-day workshop ‘Influencing behaviour: people, products, services and systems’, with which I was very kindly assisted by Sadhna Jain from Central Saint Martins. As a reference for the […]