Speakers: Grace Turtle (Sandberg Instituut), Christian Petersen (Norwich University of the Arts), and shobhan s (Purdue University & slowstudio)

• Wednesday, October 22, 15.00–17.00 BST (GMT+1)
• Online for all (register for link—choose “Please select this ticket type if you are a member of the Norwich alumni community or an industry partner”)
• In-person for Norwich University of the Arts staff and students, Duke Street Building room DS1

Welcome to Designing Sustainable Worlds, a new seminar series from the Institute for Sustainable Worlds at Norwich University of the Arts, in which we bring together interesting people and projects exploring what it means to ‘design’ ‘sustainable’ ‘worlds’—recognising that each of those terms is very much open to debate.

For our first edition, we’re joined by three educators who are also researchers, working at the forefront of novel approaches to engaging with futures in education. Futures have become an increasingly popular topic in creative education, with many new programmes and projects, often rooted in design schools, aiming to bring a degree of ‘futures literacy’ (as UNESCO defines it) to wider groups of students. But there are different models, taking alternative approaches to speculation and exploration, and our three speakers exemplify exciting work at this forefront, which we hope will be of interest to the design, futures, sustainability/transitions, and creative education community, students, educators, and researchers more widely. All welcome: please do register.

Our speakers

Grace Turtle (they/them) is a Colombian-Australian AI researcher, designer, and educator with 15+ years’ experience in strategic design and foresight. They are the Co-Head of Monstrous Futurities at the Sandberg Instituut, PhD Fellow at TU Delft, and a member of the futures design collective, Becoming. Previously, they led Design Research & Insight at Deloitte Digital (AU–NL). Their work has been featured internationally, including TEDx Sydney.

What happens when “we” try to “fix” the future before it arrives? This talk moves between queering AI, monstrous imaginaries, and embodied practices—inviting a futurity that embraces uncertainty, mutability and relationality as generative forces for transforming the worlds we inhabit.

Christian Petersen (he/him) is a graphic novelist and design researcher who uses teaching collaborations to reframe futures narrative using critical design methods, and climate critical storytelling.

In the seminar he will discuss Drawing Futures (2021-22) and Illustrating Futures (2023-24); live projects delivered in partnership between the BA illustration course (Norwich), and Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (CIFS). Here students worked with future studies methods, such as back-casting and scenario planning in developing their projects, thereby exploring parallels between future studies methods and speculative- visual narrative- and world-building practices that are fundamental to the illustration discipline.

shobhan s (he/him) makes near-future prototypes and information experiences. He trained at the Royal College of Art; has worked with design, software, electronics, art, and more since 2011; currently teaches at Purdue University; sometimes makes playful work through slowstudio; and has a website, here: setwrite.in.

In his talk, shobhan will describe two courses where students designed near-future objects and invented rituals through frugal but affective prototypes. He will also discuss how designers need to demonstrate near-futures for the world they’d like to live in, and how they should consider ’emotions’ to be their working material instead of focusing on designing artefacts.

The format is short talks, followed by a discussion moderated by Dan Lockton, Institute for Sustainable Worlds. Sign up to our newsletter to hear about future events.

Troubling Transitions: theme track at the Design Research Society 2026 conference, Edinburgh

What are the ‘growing pains’ of designing and researching for transitions and transformations in sustainability? This track invites responses to the ways design research and practice for transitions trouble legacies and assumptions in design theories, design pedagogies, professional identities of designers, design as a discipline, and how these troubles manifest as growing pains in research and practice. We encourage authors to contribute conceptual, empirical, and review papers exploring and describing the growing pains and dilemmas of the field.

I’m one of the chairs of this theme track at at DRS 2026, the Design Research Society’s international conference in Edinburgh next year, along with Femke Coops (Eindhoven University of Technology / Norwich University of the Arts), Marysol Ortega Pallanez (Arizona State University), Joanna Boehnert (Bath Spa University), Fabrizio Ceschin (Brunel, University of London), Idil Gaziulusoy (Aalto University), Silvana Juri (SARAS Institute, Uruguay / Stockholm Resilience Center), Anja Overdiek (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences), Emma Dewberry (Open University), Alma Leora Culén (University of Oslo), and Ida Nilstad Pettersen (Norwegian University of Science & Technology). This is the theme track associated with the DRS Designing for Sustainability & Transitions Special Interest Group, which has evolved from the Sustainability SIG.

More information: https://drs2026.thedrs.org/10-2-troubling-transitions

Abstract deadline: 31 Oct 2025
Full Papers: 14 Nov 2025
Conference: 8-12 June 2026, Edinburgh College of Art

Apart from this one, the DRS conference has a wide range of themes that might be of interest to readers of the blog/newsletter—it’s a fun conference and supportive community.

Library for Transformative Play launch in the Netherlands: 26 September

How can playful creative activities help teams from different disciplinary backgrounds collaborate? Playing with the Trouble is a 4-year project in which I’ve been collaborating with Raimon Ripoll Bosch, Jet Vervoort, Maikel Waardenburg, Josie Chambers, Jessica
Duncan, Joost Vervoort, Joyce Browne, and Danvy Vu, funded by the Centre for Unusual Collaborations. We’re launching our Library for Transformative Play in Utrecht, Netherlands, on 26 September, with a chance to try out games and materials designed to:

• help surface worldviews
• facilitate collective imagination
• stay with the trouble
• unmake systems
• and embrace ambiguity,

in settings ranging from classrooms to societal dialogues.

More details and link to register here: https://unusualcollaborations.ewuu.nl/agenda/playing-with-the-trouble-library-launch/

We’ll also have a Norwich event for the project early in 2026.

Sunsets and Sunrises: Lost Futures and Emerging Hopes at Tyndall Centre conference

What is going away, through both the effects of climate change, and societal transitions to more sustainable futures? Sunsets and Sunrises, a project by Femke Coops and me, is a participatory visualisation method that gives people space to engage with emotions around imagined futures that are disappearing (and appearing), as part of the phase-out and breakdown of systems, structures and practices. We developed it in the context of the IMAGINE project, and are continuing to evolve the method, including working out applications in education.

A glimpse of the project with a specific focus on climate futures, using a small selection of images from those created by 100+ participants in Norway, the Netherlands, and Italy (see previously), was exhibited at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research’s 25th anniversary conference, ‘Our Critical Decade for Climate Action’, at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, on 8 September. The poster accompanying the exhibit is available here: https://imaginari.es/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Lockton_Coops_2025_Tyndall.pdf

New Metaphors workshop for Norwich startup

Earlier this month I was joined by Norwich University of the Arts’ Knowledge Exchange team for a workshop applying New Metaphors to the needs of an innovative sustainable design-related startup based in the Norwich Research Park. If you’re interested in these kinds of workshops, using any of the Institute for Sustainable Worlds / Imaginaries Lab tools or methods (or new ones), please do get in touch. Also: New Metaphors 2.0 is under development, with Josie Chambers—some news on how you can get involved, coming soon.

Hoek van Holland Haven

Between worlds

I currently live in the Netherlands but work for a UK university (hybrid, just to be clear: I’m not in the UK all the time). And many people’s first question is, well, how does that work? Is it feasible? Why have you made your life more complicated?

In some ways it feels like a kind of forgotten possibility, a lost pre-Brexit dream of European mobility. After all, Norwich is the same distance from Rotterdam as it is from Leeds, or Wolverhampton, or even Brighton (as the seagull flies). It’s the sort of vision that I remember being part of 1990s descriptions of what would be possible with the new Europe, the feeling I got from visiting the Channel Tunnel exhibition centre at Cheriton, near Folkestone, in summer 1991 as an 8 or 9-year old, or from an early Eurostar leaflet I found that I must have picked up at some point in the late 90s. Or even from initiatives like Interreg*, explicitly recognising the value of collaborations between regions in Europe rather than only between countries as a whole. The Channel and North Sea coasts of France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands, would surely be natural collaborators for the Channel and North Sea coasts of England. When I think back, strange as it sounds, even the BBC’s short-lived, forgotten Moon and Son (of course a Robert Banks Stewart creation), about a mother and son running an astrology business (while also investigating crimes) cross-channel, Kent and Sussex to northern France, sat somewhere in my subconscious. Schemes like the Transmanche Metro or, ultimately, a positivity about things such as Schengen, would have changed a lot around the UK’s “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off” imaginary. But in a country currently dominated by a “small boats” spectre—also of course about people trying to find a world in which to make a life—this kind of vision seems a long way off.

All of which is to say: in today’s Britain—where media and politicians I once thought better of have allowed themselves to be captured and corrupted by charlatans and the brainworms of appeasing bullies and predators who will never be satiated—the immediate reaction to such an idea, living and working across the UK and ‘the mainland’ is that it is impossible or only for oligarchs. So I feel like actually doing this is in some way a prefiguration, a living-as-if this better world were more normal.

Practically, it’s definitely not a frictionless way of living, but it does allow me, as I develop the Institute for Sustainable Worlds at Norwich, to reflect a bit on the ‘worlds’ part of the name. What is it like to live between two (albeit pretty similar) worlds? It is important to say up front: my position here is one of a very privileged person moving between two wealthy northern European societies. If my skin were not white, or if I were gender non-conforming, or not a British citizen, or didn’t have a Dutch residency card, and so on, my experience would be, I am sure, very different. My aim is that the Institute becomes international in its work — while the complexities of formally being established in multiple countries are something to be explored and weighed up another day, the practicalities are that I want to make use of, myself, being (relatively) well-connected in the Netherlands, and working for a university with a good position within the East Anglian creative industries, innovation, and public sector ecosystems, to help develop something integrated that does more interesting things than could come from only one location. The Institute’s approach is going to depend on linking local and global perspectives: from communities’ imagination to planetary issues such as climate change, I believe we can address topics that are of worldwide scale yet nevertheless have impacts on people’s everyday lives at local levels. For wider European relationships between East Anglia and the Netherlands, the shared landscapes, histories, and current and future challenges of the low-lying regions, from the ever-present North Sea, to societies dealing with agricultural and industrial transitions, make research collaborations a natural opportunity for the Institute to maintain and develop. And of course there are so many tantalising ideas: Doggerland, offshore infrastructures, even the notion that just as Dutch engineers helped build the fenland landscapes of the east of England, so (as Annabel Howland told me recently) some of the sediment being deposited in the south-west Netherlands, expanding Zeeland, comes from the eroding north Norfolk coast.

Photo by Andi Sapey

Earlier in the summer I was lucky to run a workshop, New Waterscapes: Tales from Imagined Coastal Futures, as part of the joint Sainsbury Centre / Norwich University of the Arts symposium Shared Seas: Coastal Encounters organised by Candice Allison and John Kenneth Paranada. With artists, researchers, and community organisers we built speculative future North Sea land/waterscapes and explored what moments of everyday life might be like through stories. We had a Wetropolis with buildings on stilts, new seashore hermits’ cabins, giant saline frogs, and a salt-based community travelling using Zorb balls. What matters to those who live in these futures, human or otherwise? What can we learn from how we imagine these futures, that might give us insight into our current contexts? Something perhaps obvious, but interesting, that emerged for me was how the structure of “land” and “sea” leads to worlds being created that are aware of each other, but distinct, with a third society emerging in the going-between, centred on travelling.

My experience so far is that frequent travel between the Netherlands and the UK—usually on the Stena ferry route, Hoek van Holland to Harwich, with trains at both ends**—leads to an odd feeling of being something like a character in both places, maybe a wanderer or traveller, perhaps Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap***. Sometimes there is a strange kind of superposition of mental landscapes, like some passage from W.G. Sebald where the events and emotions of one context are taking place in the mind of someone in another, or the psychological juxtaposition of inner and outer landscapes of a Ballard character. (Sometimes it feels like there are perhaps too many worlds, somehow, if the journey involves an excess of doomscrolling about the collapse of American democracy, or the genocide happening right now in Gaza.) I do want to highlight here the importance of the liminal zone: the ritual of transitions, the time spent in the ferry cabin where I am nowhere, before facing Harwich International’s bleak coffee machine at 6.30am, seems an important part of the experience, reducing the abruptness of the change. The worlds are not as different culturally as those in, for example, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but they are subtly different models for a society.

And it’s that slight shift which is especially interesting, somehow. Continually encountering and switching back and forth between versions of everyday life where the basics are in common, but there are little changes in assumptions, worldviews, and emphases encoded and designed into the systems around me (traffic and crossings are the most evident) offers a way of thinking about experiential**** near-futures which while it is by no means radical, is very plausible indeed. In Utrecht as I cycle into the city centre, I see regularly the section of the Catharijnesingel canal that was until 2020 a dual carriageway road. Is this a “future”? It’s certainly an alternative, inhabitable, experienceable version of an existing world, in which different priorities are evident, but enough existing reference points are present for it to be relatable. I suspect that, from Humphrey Repton’s Red Books to Dutchifying your street to (yes, probably even) AI looksmaxxing apps for people’s own ‘future selves’, the appeal of “new worlds” that are really slightly alternative versions of our world, is effective in a somewhat different way to much more radical future visions that seem further away and more detached.

Catharijnebaan, Utrecht, Netherlands, 6 October 1973. Photo by W. Meijnen. Copyright Utrechts Archief; used under CC-BY 4.0 licence.

The same location, now Catharijnesingel , Utrecht, Netherlands, 25 August 2025. My own photo (from the cyclepath alongside)

More advanced, yet accessible

This idea that in some ways, visiting somewhere similar enough to your own world, but which does things slightly differently, can be a form of visiting “a possible future”, is not especially earth-shattering but I think it can be quite powerful. For example, Rob Hopkins’ idea of travelling to 2030 by visiting places that seem like they could be the future (not even weak signals really in the Near Future Laboratory sense, but quite strong signals—parts of futures that are definitely here, or at least there, but not evenly distributed), is perhaps obvious, but as a framing it (to me at least) seems an intriguing perspective on futures. Practically: these are models of how our world could be, in an adjacent world, an adjacent possible that is just there. More advanced yet accessible, to modify Raymond Loewy’s MAYA concept.

What could we do with this in design / research terms? I can see some possibilities for how the Institute for Sustainable Worlds might approach a form of situated futuring with communities—much more about anchoring the visions of possible futures in highly plausible variations of real places, ideally those which are recognisably similar to people, even more ideally actually places they can visit and experience.

Harwich International at dawn

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*who funded the SusLab project on which I worked, many years ago
**The designer I still am, despite everything, has a whole slew of user experience and service design improvements I could suggest for both this journey and the Eurostar experience, but that’ll have to be another post one day
***or perhaps Goodnight Sweetheart, although less duplicitously!
****in Stuart Candy’s term of course

Introducing the Institute for Sustainable Worlds

Against this ominous “1933” backdrop, last month I started what is in many ways a dream job: developing and directing the new Institute for Sustainable Worlds at Norwich University of the Arts. We are a brand-new initiative, a research studio at a specialist creative arts university in a mediaeval city in the east of England—a lively and bustling little university that has excellent teaching and knowledge exchange with its communities, very impressive facilities (and technical staff), and growing research activity and ambitions. It is a welcoming place that really does feel qualitatively different to anywhere I have worked before, and I feel extremely lucky to have this opportunity.³ (I should make it clear: this post does not necessarily represent the views of my employer.)

But what is the Institute for Sustainable Worlds going to do? And is that different when our world is being assaulted so dramatically, systems being ruined by the cruel and venal and violent? Should it be different when much of UK higher education itself is in crisis and contraction, and the UK more widely is in such a painful state of inequality? How do we relate to an academic world that really has not even begun to process how the world is changing? What responsibilities does (a small part of) a creative civic university have, locally, but also globally? Can the university be a platform for doing things in the world? Can the Institute for Sustainable Worlds be an actor, in this space—using its privilege to do things differently, usefully? How can we embody social benefit, social justice, in what we do, and how we work? There are lots of centres and groups and institutes that do amazing work academically but remain in the university bubble (I have been guilty of that too) because it’s just so much work even to do that—to maintain a pipeline of funding and projects and publications to meet the endless expectations of the treadmill (some tired metaphors here—if only we had a way to generate new ones)—let alone seriously work with society.

A few years ago, when Twitter still existed, I did a couple of threads exploring the idea of a university as a platform for doing things, and I’m taking that as one tentative starting-point for the Institute for Sustainable Worlds. A university is an organised group of intrinsically motivated (and in Norwich’s case, also very creative) people and resources, with (in theory) no motive for extractive profit (mostly). It’s a machine (in good and bad ways) with facilities and equipment and infrastructure and clever people who want to take part in things, and it has huge amounts of knowledge and expertise in its people—knowledge and expertise that is available to bring to bear on problems. If you want to make change in the world through generating (or applying) knowledge, you could see a university as a kind of incubator, a place where the sustenance to allow that to happen is provided in a warm, safe, structured environment where the goal is not primarily profit generation, but knowledge generation (in Norwich’s case, through creative practice, although not exclusively). How many types of societal institutions are able, permitted even, to prioritise knowledge generation rather than appeasing shareholders and their lobbyists? We don’t have many.

However, many universities end up very focused on themselves—about preserving their own systems and the economic systems they’re in, and so cannot be radical platforms for change—for doing things in the world—because they are too entangled in the system. But it doesn’t have to be like this. I think it’s possible—indeed urgent, given what we’re facing—for a different form of organisation to emerge, that addresses problems in the world, in context, with students learning through actually working on them, a critical co-investigation model. Maybe it seems clearer to me as a designer because the question of practically doing something (albeit often in an under-theorised way) is never far from my mind—but it would need to be interdisciplinary to be useful. Tao-Leigh Goffe argues for “the necessity of interdisciplinary methods for our collective global survival beyond the climate crisis”. Collaborations between arts, sciences, social sciences, humanities, and technologies—beyond arts being used only instrumentally—could have a powerful role in how our societies can imagine and dream what ‘sustainable’ futures might entail in everyday life. From my experience working with the pioneering Centre for Unusual Collaborations in the Netherlands, I have seen the value of how approaches, often creative or playful methods, from ‘outside’ particular disciplines, can enable groups to understand each other better, from understanding different worldviews to developing collaborative future projects together.

Imagination infrastructuring

Now, I know how constraining a pure “design” framing can be when this is really about creative (research) methods, and the multiple roles they can play in sustainability, Norwich, both university and city. But also, as April Soetarman so succinctly reminds us, you can do anything but not everything. The Institute for Sustainable Worlds could be a centre for sustainability in the arts, or a centre for sustainable design, but both of these are huge topics and there are excellent groups already doing this. The name is also important: ‘sustainability’ as a concept has plenty of limitations, as many people have explored, but my current thinking is that that discussion itself is a useful one to have, as part of what we do. What are we aiming to sustain—and what are we not?

I think we need to focus on a particular way of approaching the intersection of sustainability and creative research methods, and the angle that makes most sense to me is imagination, and how it relates to our collective futures. We’re trapped because we can’t imagine alternatives to our current trajectory. The “crisis of imagination” that Amitav Ghosh, Geoff Mulgan, Ruha Benjamin, and others have identified is something that critically-informed creative methods are well-placed to address. They can surface cultural assumptions about futures and what worlds people assume to be desirable or possible. They can materialise aspects of diverse (and divergent) possible futures in engaging and experiential ways—enabling provocation, confrontation, emotion, and reflection, including on (contested) pasts and presents and people’s lived experiences. But they can also open up collective imagination for more sustainable worlds—building capacity and confidence to imagine, visualise, and experiment with different futures and more just societies, beyond dominant imaginaries, and with new interactions between humans, nature, and technologies. We can use storytelling and speculative design to bring imagined futures to life experientially, even prefiguring new ways to live—all the while valuing plurality and avoiding a singular ‘prediction’ model—but we can also work on developing methods and tools and techniques and opportunities for others to do so: futures literacy (in the confidently reading/writing/critiquing sense) and imagination literacy more widely. (I’d really like to explore how the Institute can work with Norwich as a UNESCO City of Literature in this context: this is a City of Stories after all.)

The Worlds part of ‘Sustainable Worlds’ could be very powerful—there is an inherent valuing of plurality (or even pluriversality) and what multiple futures can co-exist, but also a recognition that applying creative methods to understanding people’s own worlds, their lived experiences, their imaginaries, hopes, and fears, nostalgia, is just as important as society-level visions. (Norwich’s work around mental health and arts fits well here, I think). I’ve spent the past decade or more trying to explore imaginaries (in one form or another) through design methods, and while some of that has been aligned more with imaginaries of technologies—e.g. spookiness, or qualities, or alternative ways of thinking about AI or robots—much of it has really been around ways for people to share and materialise aspects of their own worlds, from students’ mental health to how we imagine energy, and I see this as part of a continuum with imagining and enacting different futures, since those futures are never created in isolation.

We can see the Institute for Sustainable Worlds as aligned with the imagination infrastructures and collective imagination movement (as discussed by Cassie Robinson, Olivia Oldham, Keri Facer, Ruth Potts, Joost Vervoort, Roy Bendor, and others, and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation), or the amazing work that people such as Phoebe Tickell, Amahara Spence, and Rob Hopkins are doing. Ruha Benjamin makes an interesting argument that imagination itself is infrastructure. In general I think of what we do as imagination infrastructuring, inspired by Chris Le Dantec and Carl DiSalvo’s interpretation of infrastructuring through design as “creating socio-technical resources that intentionally enable adoption and appropriation beyond the initial scope of the design”. Developing creative methods to help people share their worlds, is a form of imagination infrastructuring that works in people’s current worlds as much as futures.

And so, although this is a research institute, knowledge exchange via public engagement, events (both in Norwich and elsewhere), collaborations with organisations inside and outside of the university system, and ultimately short courses, are all part of what we can do. I hope through this engagement, we can also develop and prefigure new models for how a university research group can be and act in the world. Alternative models for education and research in related areas such as Black Mountains College, the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, School for Poetic Computation, School of Critical Design, Transition Design Institute, School of Systems Change, School of International Futures, School of Good Services, Urban Futures Studio, School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe, Monstrous Futurities, Future Observatory, Dark Laboratory, CLEAR, National Centre for Writing, Centre for Sociodigital Futures, Center for Science & the Imagination, Lab4Living, the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Monash Futures Hub, the Planetary Civics Inquiry (Dark Matter Labs + RMIT + RISD + others) and many more, with varying degrees of embedding within or outside of a ‘conventional’ academic or university structure, are inspirational in different ways. What can we do that benefits from being part of a (quite unconventional) university, but with open doors?

I very much welcome ideas to expand and reshape this list, but some crucial areas where I think we need these imagination infrastructuring methods include aspects of climate adaptation (our physical environment, our relationships with nature and living in changing landscapes, social practices and culture, energy, resources, transport), climate justice, communities and their futures, human and planetary health and wellbeing, new economic models in an era of degrowth and post-growth, just transitions, co-design, policy development, and our relationships with technologies. We can’t do all of it, although many of these topics are deeply interconnected anyway. But we also need these kinds of methods for teams’ own processes, for supporting new ways to think and approach complex systems creatively, regardless of topic. One of the main insights from seeing how people have used the New Metaphors cards over the past few years (and to some extent with Unbox) is just how people have found applications that are really about building capacity to think differently, rather than directly creating new metaphors to use instrumentally.

Building this together

Some of this imagination capacity is more about our own lives and how we think about them, while some is about societal or even global scales. How can we do work which builds on Norwich and East Anglia’s context—a rural area, already one of the most vulnerable in the UK to climate change, with world-leading research centres on climate, food, and so on—and links it with ideas and knowledge and communities elsewhere, including my own adopted home of the Netherlands (which has much shared history with the east of England) but also around the world? How do we ensure that work towards better worlds is not done in isolation?

If you think you might be interested in collaborating with us, please do get in touch (d.lockton@norwichuni.ac.uk). This is a collaborative effort, and I wouldn’t dare to presume that we could do this alone. While I want us to do some of the work of building the Institute for Sustainable Worlds “out loud”—to share our thinking as we go along, and connect with people who are doing allied work ⁴—developing the Institute is also going to be about inviting people into the process more actively. I’m inspired by the excited / intrigued / curious questions I’ve had from everyone I’ve met so far at Norwich, about what exactly the Institute is going to do, but also by ideas and hope in some great talks by (and with) visitors to Norwich over the past few weeks, including Saskia van Stein, Annabel Howland, Peter Cook, and glimpses of new perspectives from exhibitions such as the amazing Can the Seas Survive Us? at UEA’s Sainsbury Centre (curated by Ken Paranada) and Arieh Frosh and Ed Compson’s fusion of Doggerland and offshore wind energy at the East Gallery. We have a (slightly) more established sibling at Norwich, the Institute for Creative Technologies and the very impressive Immersive Visualisation and Simulation Lab (below) which offer some intriguing possibilities for experiences and new forms of engagement.

The building in Norwich where the Institute will be based is at Bank Plain, the former Barclays Bank just down from the castle and opposite Anglia Television (home of Tales of the Unexpected). But the other end of the building marks the start of London Street, the first pedestrianised street in the UK (in the sense of: a former through road which was closed to motor traffic) and in some ways that enactment of a different kind of future, nearly 60 years ago, also gives me hope.

Future blog posts / newsletters will explore specific aspects of developing the Institute for Sustainable Worlds, including ways to get involved, specific topics and areas of focus, thinking through our links with Europe and further afield, and how to build a community. And keep an eye out: we will (I hope) be advertising a couple of jobs in the coming months.

 Notes

1. And sadly it seems like many university presidents in the US—a more powerful position than a UK vice-chancellor or Dutch rector—are, so far at least, largely content to comply and keep schtum in the hope that the bullies don’t pick on them next (even though they already are, as the Columbia example). I remember, when I worked at an American university, the linguistic contortions around academic freedom, and essentially “maybe some crumbs will fall from Trump’s table”, that the senior management used to defend giving a Trump crony a sinecure in the face of a massive petition from students and staff. Too much of the framing so far is about losing overheads, essentially, rather than destroying society, or what’s actually right or wrong. American academia and scholarship is being bulldozed: NIH, NSF, even Fulbright Scholarships smashed by a group of fascists, and I don’t hear anywhere near enough in UK (or Dutch) academic discussions about the longer-term effects of this on the world, given American dominance in so many areas. (back)

2. The systems that have kept us, privileged people among the societies of the global north, largely safe, are, we are quickly realising, apparently “designed to let the very worst people rise, designed not only to allow them to rise but to prefer that people such as this will rise” as A.R. Moxon puts it, echoing a Stafford Beer-esque ‘the purpose of a system is what it does’ argument. Of course the systemic dimension of all of this is not news to those who have highlighted over and over again systemic injustices, particularly racism and sexism. But it seems as though the system’s output of chaos and hate has moved up to an even more dangerous level. I’m not sure that the systemic design community—wonderful as they are—has really reckoned with this kind of issue yet. (back)

3. For myself: for the first time in my academic career—which if I date it from the start of my PhD, in 2007, is 18 years, which seems like a lifetime away—I feel as though “proving myself” means something else now. If I look at it more clearly, I have spent 18 years seeking approval/validation really, as so many of us do in academia. The idea of endlessly striving to get yet another paper out or taking on more admin because that’s what you “should” do if you want the tenure/promotion committee to see you as a valid person, seems quite misguided in retrospect, when all many of us really want is to be trusted to try out some ideas, and not infantilised. My hope is now that writing those papers is because they are intrinsically interesting, and useful to the community, and ultimately to society, not because it’s what the system demands just to stand still. At least, that’s the mindset I hope I can adopt. It feels like (with grateful thanks to everyone who has helped and supported me along the way) I have emerged from climbing a tangled path up a hill, through a bank of fog, covered in burdocks and nettle stings, and finding that there’s a mysterious valley ahead, down below, with a shaft of sunlight through the clouds. It’s clear that mental landscapes needs some additional metaphors! (back)

4. I am so often inspired by organisations and people who do this well, for example Louise Armstrong’s recent post about building the Decelerator and while I think the speed of our work might not quite yet suit the weeknote format (maybe in time it will!) I do want to share some regular updates. As I noted back in December, there was a period when I used to blog regularly, and write, and share things, and put tools and ideas out there for people to use. The last few years, though, I realise that I’ve disappeared, somewhat. I’d retreated into a much more narrowly bounded academic institutional cattle-crush, in which aspirations and ideas are redirected into serving a system which demands certain things. I didn’t blog much any more because putting ideas out there like I used to do made me feel vulnerable, risky within a career where everything hinges on what people think of you, and where judging and assessing people (whether students or staff) is, for some, the whole point.

I wrote a draft of a long post about this—academia as duck decoy—(among other topics) in 2022 and then never published it, because it came across as too negative even for me, but one of the parts which I feel is important to get out, was this—partly because my new job does not share these characteristics, and yet so much of academia seems to:

“When the system replaces your goals with its goals, it does so gradually, until you look back on a week (one of less than 2000 | have left in my life, if I’m lucky) and think, well, what did I do this week? I pasted my signature into some forms and assigned quantified figures to students’ work using a standardised rubric I played no part in developing. I excitedly read something inspiring that someone somewhere else has being doing, and wished I had the motivation and time and opportunity to do something similar, if only I could get out of the burnout room. It will be the same next week. It seems like the academic system so often only values you, if that’s the right word, for as long as you are a reliable, interchangeable component; some variants might allow “doing you own thing” In your own time, but it seems rare for them to support you doing it—if anything it’s seen as an eccentricity. A huge part of the appeal of academia for me—and I know for others—is exactly the freedom to explore, to think, with other motivated and curious people. It is appealing! Or at least, this imagined version of it is.”

But: I miss blogging, and thinking out loud. And I think this new job is different. I feel ambitious and excited and want to share ideas with people! (back)

This blog is now in its 20th year* and it’s been in the wilderness for a bit. I feel as though for the last few years, I’ve mainly used blogging, and the newsletter version of it, to recite lists of “things I have done”/”events I have organised or am currently organising”. This is what, so often, the academic system seems to want: continuous justification of one’s right to exist via proof of “outputs”. I have done much less exploration of ideas via the blog or newsletter, or offered pointers towards interesting things and people, than I used to, or blogged about work in progress (because that’s not an “output”). There haven’t even been any of the longer—2,000, 8,000, even 10,000 word posts that I sometimes did, to work out thoughts through writing (and readers’ responses). Career dependence on writing endless academic papers (again, because it’s what the system expects) anticipating reviewers’ critique, has also unfortunately had a souring effect on my ability to blog in a fun or exploratory way: every sentence or idea becomes a site which needs to be fully justified, defended against being (mis)interpreted or picked apart, and that worry has a tendency to stop blog posts in their tracks. But I should remember Simon Willison’s simple advice here, not to worry too much about uniqueness (it’s OK to say “I just figured this out: here are my notes, you may find them useful too” as he puts it), but also, “If you do a project, you should write about it. I recommend adding “write about it” to your definition of “done” for anything that you build or create.” Somehow that has slipped, for me, amidst everything. Of course, the growth and then latterly techbrofascist takeover of much social media over these two decades have interacted in different ways with my blogging. Moments of distraction in the long dark evenings (mostly admin-related) of academia suited short Twitter-style interactions very well, until the platform was destroyed, better than longer-form writing.

Moments from the studio this year

Anyway: the point is, I think finally I’m on the verge of being able to write more effectively again. In 2024 I was lucky to be in a position to do a number of things I’d been hoping to be able to for a long time, including putting together a physical studio space for the Imaginaries Lab in Utrecht (another time: I will write about what I think I’ve learned about the kind of space which is conducive to creative research activities)—and also finding a new position at somewhere more closely aligned with my vision and hopes for what universities can be, in an age of climate crisis. In February 2025 I’ll join Norwich University of the Arts, where I will be developing the new Institute for Sustainable Worlds. There are many ways in which a new institute and amazing new colleagues can help invigorate new kinds of ideas and connections and ways of sharing them, and I intend to make this an important part of my approach.

In the meantime though, what happened in 2024?

This year, in teaching and research (which, as I’ve written about before, are often very intertwined in design), I have focused as much as I can on designing tools and methods to help people, together, explore how they imagine, and imagine differently (futures more broadly, but also past imaginaries of futures, futures of everyday life, personal futures, organisational futures, new kinds of collaborations…). This, for me, is an important part of imagination infrastructuring, as introduced by Cassie Robinson and developed further by researchers such as Ruth Potts, Keri Facer, Joost Vervoort, Roy Bendor, and others. It’s maybe a gradual clarification of the Imaginaries Lab‘s mission. I’ve been part of three main funded research projects this year, IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability (led by Oslo Metropolitan University, funded by the Research Council of Norway), Playing With The Trouble: A Travelling Library for Transformative Play, and [UN]BOX: Unpacking, Cocreating, and Materialising Collaborative Research Processes for Shared Learning, Purpose and Impact (both funded by the Centre for Unusual Collaborations). Towards the end of the year I was also part of a successful application for a seed grant from the Institute for a Circular Society around upcycling in Utrecht. As so often, each of these projects really comprises lots of smaller sub-projects and activities. I’ve been lucky to be able to run workshops and give presentations at events including the Anticipation conference in Lancaster, Utopia*Art*Politics in Utrecht, RSD in Oslo,and (online) DRS 2024 in Boston, and collaborated with some really great people all over the world. I’ve been on some great train and ferry journeys! I’m also privileged to have worked with some wonderful students at TU Eindhoven. But of course, all of this is against a world of great injustice and horror: I have been very very lucky this year (I also got engaged, and moved house) but I know many others haven’t. We need new models, in so many areas.

Sunsets & Sunrises on display at Litteraturhuset in Oslo

Sunsets and Sunrises: Lost Futures and Emerging Hopes

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
Octavia Butler

The most satisfying project this year has been developing Sunsets & Sunrises with my IMAGINE colleague Femke Coops. We’ll share more once we’ve written it up more fully, but in short, it’s both a collaborative art piece and a participatory research probe into people’s imaginaries of futures. Collectively, sharing our lost futures (via our sunsets) creates a collaborative memorial, but also (via our sunrises) a shared witnessing of the emergence of hope for new possibilities.

Sunsets & Sunrises workshops, including photos by Paula Angelica

Our starting point is the question of what is going away, in our transitions to more sustainable futures? And how does that feel? The Sunsets and Sunrises activity aims to give us space to engage with our emotions around imagined futures that are disappearing (and appearing), as part of the phase-out and breakdown of systems, structures and practices. We use creative materials to help participants share ideas and emotions of imagined futures that we have perhaps had to let go (‘sunsets’), or which we realise are disappearing, both personally and at a larger scale—whether as part of transitions to a more sustainable society or exactly because of the current state of the world. But we also explore (‘sunrises’) what futures might be on their way, already effective (and affective) in our presents, bringing hope for better worlds and ways to live. The activity builds on Femke’s work (with Caroline Hummels and Kristina Bogner) on designing spaces for letting go in sustainability transitions, and my own work on new metaphors, also taking inspiration from work including Mark Fisher’s writing on nostalgia for lost futures, Candy Chang’s After the End, Vanessa Andreotti’s Hospicing Modernity, and Kristina Lindström, Li Jönsson, Christina Lindqvist, Jonas Larsen and Per-Anders Hillgren’s Grief and Hope in Transition, among others.

Sunsets & Sunrises discs—a glimpse of the kinds of images participants produced

Through four workshops in the Netherlands (including Staying with / Playing with Pain: The role of emotions in deep transformative change processes, organised by Kristina Bogner and Femke) and in Norway, participants have created approaching 100 sunset and sunrise discs, each hand-drawn or painted to tell a story of a possible future setting or rising. A selection of sunsets and sunrises was exhibited at Litteraturhuset in Oslo from 10–15 December as part of The Futures We Imagine (thanks to Marie Hebrok, Nina Heidenstrøm, James Lowley, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg, Maria Moreno, and everyone else from Oslo Met who organised the exhibition!), and will remain part of the exhibition as it travels to other locations in Oslo. A Sunsets and Sunrises ‘kit’ will be included in the Playing with the Trouble travelling libraries (see below) installed at Utrecht University, University Medical Center Utrecht, Wageningen University & Research, and Eindhoven University of Technology.

Imagining Future Everydays exhibition at Kazerne in Eindhoven. Including photos by Merel van Lieshout and Lenneke Kuijer

Imagining Future Everydays

It was my second (and it turned out, final) year leading the Researching the Future Everyday master’s course at TU Eindhoven, co-teaching with Lenneke Kuijer, Emilia Viaene, and Femke Coops (here’s our syllabus)—with support also from the IMAGINE project—and this year the course culminated with our exhibition, Imagining Future Everydays, at Kazerne in Eindhoven in June. 25 Industrial Design master’s students showed their seven projects—but these were designed not as “final” products, but as “deployed” research probes to explore visitors’ ideas and emotions around different imagined futures. Inspired by briefs around a “cabinet of rarities from 2050”, disputing automated decisions in future homes, and challenging consumerism by design, students developed projects ranging from a government-run voting system for which new products are permitted to be brought into production (complete with subversive activists), to the Relaxometer, a state-of-the-art machine that offers an hyper efficient relaxation experience, to a glimpse of a future where water shortages mean localised weather control is available to the wealthy—and also a thriving informal economy. You can see all the projects, and read the research paper the students wrote based on the insights gained from exhibition visitors, in the catalogue (PDF).

We had some great guest talks and workshops from Joycelyn Longdon, Josie Chambers, Eva Oosterlaken, and at the exhibition itself, Juli Sikorska, bringing a variety of perspectives on thinking about futures, the environment, and design research. In the exhibition we were also joined by Peng-Kai Hung, showing his work exploring the design possibilities (and concerns) of using generative AI for playful urban interaction, and Vere Vreeswijk showing her Becoming Climate Friendly journal (which received 2nd place in the Social Design Talent award from the municipality of Eindhoven).

Imagining Future Everydays exhibition at Kazerne in Eindhoven. Including photos by Merel van Lieshout and Lenneke Kuijer

A selection of our Researching the Future Everyday projects and other TU/e student projects responding to briefs relating to IMAGINE from the last couple of years were also included in The Futures We Imagine at Litteraturhuset in Oslo from 10–15 December.

TU Eindhoven student projects on display at Litteraturhuset, Oslo

The Unbox prototype (photo by Kuangyi Xing) and parts of the design process

Unbox: Metaphorical spaces for unusual collaborations

I’ve been exploring (with others) metaphors in various ways for a few years now, from generating new metaphors, to their places within systems, to their relationship with Gregory Bateson’s syllogism in grass, to making them tangible through landscapes or more complex patterns of both static and dynamic storytelling. One area where the tangibility angle has been especially interesting is in exploring and enabling new ways of imagining collaborations and projects themselves. We often use metaphors when talking about collaboration—they can be a way to bridge disciplinary boundaries, assumptions, and worldviews, grow the capacity for inter- and transdisciplinarity, and (hopefully) ensure people from different backgrounds are ‘on the same page’. As my colleague Jonas Torrens points out, the word project itself hides a metaphor: it derives from the Latin proicere, to throw forward. It is common to use metaphors such as ‘milestones’, ‘building blocks’, ‘goals’, ‘horizons’, ‘work packages’, and ‘missions’ in projects, just as we use ‘fields’ and ‘areas’ to discuss disciplines or types of work. Metaphors have lots of advantages as a form of shared vocabulary—but they are a form of model, and the models used can trap us in particular ways of thinking and working, reproducing assumptions and structures.

With Jonas Torrens, Jillian Student, Merijn Bruijnes, Federico Andreotti, Kuangyi Xing, Niva van der Geer, and now joined by Niki Puskás and Gabriele Ferri, since 2023 I have been part of Unbox, funded by the Centre for Unusual Collaborations, in which we are exploring how physicalising metaphorical spaces (caves, islands, outer space, and so on) can be a way for groups or teams to imagine different ways of working together.

In 2024, Unbox reached a stage of maturity where—with a physical ‘boardgame’ kit designed by Kuangyi Xing—we were able to run some (very enjoyable) playtest workshops, at RSD 13: Rivers of Conversations (the Systemic Design Association conference) in Oslo, and ITD 24: Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Beyond Buzzwords, the international transdisciplinarity conference in Utrecht, as well as at a Centre for Unusual Collaborations event. Helma van Luttikhuizen interviewed Federico Andreotti and me for a short piece about our ITD experience. Looking forward to further developments with Unbox in 2025—we were recently awarded a full Unusual Collaborations grant for the year ahead.

Unbox workshops at RSD 13, Oslo, and ITD 24, Utrecht (including photo by Caspar Merlijn Photography)

Future Webs workshop at EWUU Alliance Autumn Meeting in Ede

Playing with the Trouble

I won’t say too much about Playing with the Trouble project for now, since we are in our final phase (ending March 2025) and will have a lot more to share very soon. But, with a great team—Josie Chambers, Jet Vervoort, Joost Vervoort, Maikel Waardenburg, Raimon Ripoll Bosch, Jessica Duncan, Joyce Browne, and with design and assistance from Danvy Vu, Saskia Colombant, Clara Schuster, Kyle Thompson, Sable Knight, Lotte de Lint, and Carien Moossdorff—over the last few years, we have developed “a travelling library for transformative play”, a collection of brand-new and iterated/developed activities and games which support groups who are developing new kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations, through approaches such as surfacing worldviews, challenging power, and collectively re-imagining. In 2024, I have been involved in developing a few activities for the library, including Future Webs (with Jet Vervoort), a kind of combination of futures wheels with something like Amy Twigger-Holroyd’s Fashion Fictions worlds in a physical workshop format (most recently run for the EWUU Alliance’s Autumn Meeting in Ede, Netherlands). The library (physical and digital) will also include versions of Sunsets & Sunrises (with Femke Coops), along with an amazing array of games created by team members at Utrecht University, University Medical Centre Utrecht, and Wageningen University & Research. Special thanks to the Centre for Unusual Collaborations for funding us from 2021–25, and to Danvy Vu for being our designer for the last year of the project.

Future Webs kit prototypes

Looking ahead

I’m about to embark on an experiment in cross-border living (Utrecht) and working (Norwich) which is now much more complicated than it would have been before the British government took away so many of our rights. I am hopeful that being a “citizen of nowhere” will actually enable new kinds of perspectives, links, collaborations, and frankly, knowledge exchange. We shall see. But I’m very excited indeed for what we might be able to imagine, and build, and what sunrises are ahead.

Good luck for 2025, and thank you to everyone for your support this year.

*The first WordPress post on the blog was in November 2005, but I’d had the site for a few months as a kind of manual blog, adding short update notes to an HTML page, as far as I can remember — it was all about my Master’s project. It was a different world in so many ways.

Save the date: Imagining Future Everydays
Tuesday 11 June, 13.30–17.00

Kazerne, Paradijslaan 8 5611 KN Eindhoven, Netherlands (15 min walk / 5 min cycle from Eindhoven Centraal)

Join us in the beautiful surroundings of Kazerne for an afternoon of experiences from TU/e Industrial Design’s Researching the Future Everyday course (taught by Dan Lockton, Lenneke Kuijer, and Emilia Viaene, with Femke Coops and Sacha Prudon).

This year we’re tackling three intersecting themes:

• challenging consumerism by design 

• disputing automated decisions in the future home 

• cabinets of rarities from 2050

plus: 

• activities exploring imagination & futures from our community

• contributions from the IMAGINE project

Everyone welcome — drop in, stay for as long or as little as you like. More details to follow (including the exhibition catalogue). Please sign up so we know roughly how many people are intending to come (for refreshments).

Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/imagining-future-everydays-tickets-902480532567

More about Researching the Future Everyday

When we imagine “the future” we are not acting in isolation: we are doing our imagining in a broad sociological and cultural context which influences what we believe to be possible or desirable. As designers, we are also often in a position to make “our” visions of futures come into being, in conjunction with technological innovation, but also against a backdrop of a world facing significant crises and transitions, in climate, health, inequality, social justice, and biodiversity loss. How can we negotiate these vast questions responsibly?

This course combines a speculative and critical design approach, drawing on work in experiential futures, with insights from other disciplines, in the arts, humanities, and social sciences (and in fiction) addressing aspects of how people imagine everyday life in different futures. This enables using design methods to explore alternative, transformative perspectives on futures, with a foundation of knowledge and insights beyond design itself.

Course guide | 2023 projects (PDF)

In this DRSelects, we speak with Dan Lockton, DRS Executive Board member, on his DRS Digital Library selections emphasising design tools for imagination and critical co-investigation.

Hello, I’m Dan Lockton. I was elected to the DRS Executive Board in 2022, after serving on the International Advisory Council since 2020. I was involved in a small way with the organisation of DRS 2016 in Brighton, and then was the programme committee chair for DRS 2022 in Bilbao and online. My first DRS conference was DRS 2014 in Umeå, which was such a refreshing and engaging experience as a participant that it set me on a course of gradually becoming more involved in the DRS’s activities: it is a friendly community. I live in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, but am originally from Devon, UK.

My current research centres on creating and using design tools for participatory (re-) imagining: helping people, together, create and explore possible futures, imagine new ways to live, and understand ourselves, technologies, and the world around us better, in an age of crises in climate and social inequalities. As part of this line of work, I am a co-chair of the DRS 2024 track ‘Designing (for) Transitions and Transformations: Imagination, Climate Futures, and Everyday Lives’ with Femke Coops and a great team of fellow co-chairs. We hope this track will bring together the DRS community around Transition Design, imaginaries, and futures. In the past, I have worked a lot on topics such as design for behaviour change (particularly around sustainability), mental models, design and energy use, some unusual interfaces using sonification or more qualitative approaches, and even questions of the haunted and spooky in technology. In design academia I have been lucky enough to work for a variety of institutions—Brunel, Warwick, and the Royal College of Art in the UK, Carnegie Mellon in the USA, and currently TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands—and have seen a range of quite different approaches to design research and education (and what is valued).

Throughout my academic career, I have tried to maintain at least partially one foot in design practice, through the Imaginaries Lab, which publishes tools such as New Metaphors, and also running workshops and giving talks at ‘industry’ events such as the IxDA conferences, indeed using these to do research where possible. My aim in my own future is to try to take this hybrid studio model much more seriously as a platform, a way of bringing together research, education, and action in the world—I am increasingly uncertain that our existing academic institutions are suited to the challenges the world faces.

Could you talk about the initiatives you’re involved with in the DRS and any upcoming events you’d like to share?

The DRS Digital Library has been one of the most impressive initiatives I have seen from the DRS over the past few years. As part of the Executive Board over the last year, I have been organising a working group including members of the International Advisory Council in which we are exploring future directions for the library—how could it evolve? What features might be possible? Could it, in time, become the starting-point for exploring design research of all kinds, connecting contemporary and historical publications across fields and venues? Having now seen behind the scenes, and the amount of work that Peter Lloyd, Lenny Martinez Dominguez, and everyone else involved has put in to build and maintain the library, I am very aware of the constraints that this kind of platform involves, but also, as so often with design, those constraints can inspire creative possibilities! One of our upcoming plans is to do some ‘user research’ with DRS members and other users of the library, to understand what works, what doesn’t, and to learn from people’s ideas, so watch this space.

What do you see as the benefits of being involved with the DRS and how can those interested become more involved in the Society?

It can be lonely doing research, especially if you don’t have a community around you. DRS is a way to ‘find the others’, to become part of an international group connecting people, ideas, and institutions. The SIGs can be a great way to meet passionate people with similar interests in design, and attending the conferences (whether you are able to take part online, or in-person) can really help with meeting people and sharing ideas. But in terms of becoming more involved in the Society itself, I would recommend getting in touch with any of us on the Executive Board or International Advisory Council with your ideas.

Please choose five items from the DRS Digital Library that you’d like to highlight.

If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would have probably picked out papers much more directly focused on topics related to how I saw my research at the time—design theory and design practice (and the links between them), and design’s intersections with other fields, such as sustainability and politics. But the reality of everyday life as a ‘design academic’ for many of us is that educational activities (teaching), and facilitating workshops with groups (project partners, members of the public, etc) are often the main opportunities to do ‘research’ as part of our jobs. I know I’m not the only one with this experience.

Devising new ways to support people in sparking and materialising imagination—helping people imagine, explore, and experience different ways of thinking and being, for themselves and society more widely, or applying (or developing) theory to particular contexts in the world, is a shared aim of many educational and ‘knowledge exchange’ activities in design—and indeed a significant part of design’s role in society’s transitions to more sustainable and just futures, if we are able to do it. Perhaps naïvely, I like to think that this is a way that design can contribute to enabling hope in times of crisis, part of the scope of imagination infrastructuring in Cassie Robinson’s term. The long traditions of co-design and participatory design (together with the kinds of ‘convivial’ design tools as named by Liz Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers (2012), following Ivan Illich), of course can have something in common with the more transformative, liberatory approach to education and practice offered by, for example, Paulo Freire’s (1970) notion of students (or perhaps ‘participants’) as “critical co-investigators”. Design methods can support us all becoming critical co-investigators of our worlds.

So, after exploration of different parts of the Digital Library, I have chosen seven items (it was hard enough to reduce my much longer list down this far, let alone to five!) from recent years which are each, in their own way, inspirational for me in engaging with design methods and activities in this way. A type of paper that is particularly well-represented in the DRS Digital Library (compared to, say, the ACM Digital Library, which I also use regularly) is what we might call a report on what people are doing and what they’re thinking about—a kind of ‘work in progress’ but also an example of (as I understand it) something like what Bill Gaver (2012) called “theories that are provisional, contingent, and aspirational” in design, “an endless string of design examples,” not necessarily in the form of annotated portfolios of artefacts, but discursive glimpses of how other people are thinking and acting through design processes. These papers are offerings to the field, in a way, not (usually) claiming generalisability at all, but rather hinting at possibilities (often with an abductive kind of reasoning), propositional hooks for others to latch onto and build on. These are one of the kinds of conference papers that I think the DRS community does well—and which are much less common at self-consciously “prestigious” conferences such as CHI where they may struggle to make it past reviewers determined to quash such non-normative epistemologies.

The first paper I have chosen is Lesley-Ann Noel’s Envisioning a pluriversal design education (2020), from the Pluriversal Design SIG’s Pivot 2020 conference. It is inspiring because of its aim to “make a case for locally developed curricula” in design, “built around the experiences of people from the Global South”, rather than the default transposition to everywhere on Earth of industry-focused curricula (that are not even, honestly, appropriate in the Global North either, in an age of climate crisis). The approach that Lesley-Ann takes is really rooted in design as being a way for people to take action in their worlds, to propose (or act) in ways that embody critique of the systems around them. Via a set of five ‘sketches’ of different types of curriculum that “separate design education from innovation or consumption, and instead focus on identity, agency, culture, and building thinking skills”—including design education “through a decolonial lens”, “a design curriculum that celebrates a pan-African identity”, and “a curriculum for ‘vulnerable economies’”—she gives us an inspirational set of starting-points for doing things differently.

In a related vein, also at the intersection of critical pedagogy and design, Insurgent Design Coalitions: The history of the Design & Oppression network by Frederick van Amstel, Batista e Silva Sâmia, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa, Mazzarotto Marco, Ricardo Artur Carvalho, and Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto (2021) describes the development of a design coalition in Brazil, the Design & Oppression Network. The coalition aimed to “establish bonds of solidarity between all the struggles against oppression, taking design as a tool, space, or issue” in the context of “the Latin-American reality” and carrying out “educational actions” during the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic: weekly online study group meetings discussing how the works of authors such as bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and Augusto Boal could be related to design—but also a surrounding network of care and mutual aid. As the paper notes, “actors do not coalesce only by sharing interests but by helping each other in their struggles”. Through experimenting with the affordances of Discord, the group created new structures for discussion and participation, including the role of a complicatorrather than a facilitator. The paper—presented at the Pluriversal Design SIG’s Pivot 2021 conference—discusses the ongoing repercussions and developments the network instigated, across educational institutions in Brazil and internationally. Aside from the practicalities of work itself being inspirational, I found it especially important to recognise the point made that “if design research wants to have productive engagements with social movements” this should not be about “instrumentalising (and watering down)” the forms of real social movements and forms of organising, as is sometimes seen in social design (and which I recognise, guiltily, having done a bit of myself).

Care is also part of my third choice from the Digital Library, Sasha de Koninck and Laura Devendorf’s Objects of Care (2022), from the main DRS 2022 Bilbao conference proceedings. The paper discusses a card deck (with some unusual features) used in a workshop activity through which people’s attention is turned towards their own bodily interactions with textiles and other materials—a practice of noticing the ways in which materials ‘notice’ the bodies that use them. There are elements in the paper which resonate with my own research, from card decks to metaphors to the ways in which use and wear create qualitative displays of objects’ own interaction histories (autographic design, in Dietmar Offenhuber’s term (2023)). But two things really intrigued me about Sasha and Laura’s paper. Their focus on “prompting people to take time with the old and ‘gross’ and see them as rich historical artefacts, a kind of archaeology of the body constructed through the marks and smells it left on textiles” is distinctive in a field so dominated by idolising the new, and again it is very much an activity that meets people where they are, in the messy, worn contexts of their own lives, and supports being vulnerable together, as doable by students as by scientists or societal stakeholders. And secondly, the practical design choices made with the cards, one suit of which—inspired by Sister Corita Kent’s ‘viewfinder’ idea (Kent & Steward, 1992)—included holes through which participants could focus on particular details, a form of ‘deep looking’ in Sasha and Laura’s terms. This is such a powerful idea, which we also see for different purposes in examples such as John Willshire’s Where the Light Gets In kit, but which also, as a metaphor, seems important for considering in transformative design (education) more generally. Viewfinders that help us take different views, to notice what we don’t notice, from interactions to infrastructure, are surely part of a critically-informed practice.

My fourth choice, Theory instruments: Helping designers see the invisible by Jacob Buur, Mette Kjærsgaard, Franciska Fellegi, Sisse Schaldemose, and Tom Djajadiningrat (2023), from the Nordes 2023 conference, and fifth choice, Feral Ways of Knowing and Doing: Tools and resources for transformational creative practice by Cristina Ampatzidou, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, and Andrea Botero (2021), from Pivot 2021, are both about practical workshop activities. In the Theory Instruments paper, students try to ‘materialise’ theories (from anthropology, STS, and related fields) through iterations of building physical models, in which materials, layouts, structures and interactions between elements come to physicalise aspects of the theoretical constructs and frameworks. This work was exciting to see: as something like a form of qualitative constructive data physicalisation, it parallels some of what Lisa Brawley, Manuela Aguirre Ulloa, Matt Prindible, Laura Forlano, Karianne Rygh, John Fass, Katie Herzog, Bettina Nissen and myself tried to explore with our work on tangible thinking and thinking with things, but with a much more focused link to theory. The value of people using real materials to express their understanding of abstract concepts—and together come closer to understanding each other’s understanding—is a large part of my current work with the Centre for Unusual Collaborations in the Netherlands, where facilitating (or perhaps complicating!) unusual collaborations between disciplines often involves a creative process of people coming to see each other’s worldviews (and perhaps reflect on their own). It was this creative crossdisciplinary aspect (among others) that also appealed to me about the activities in the Feral Ways of Knowing and Doing paper, in which creative practitioners shared tools and resources that they considered to embody a ‘feral’ approach, “broadly denot[ing] the alternative, experimental, more-than-human, and wild, challenging the dominant ontological and epistemological discourses”, building on the use of the term by authors such as Anna Tsing, Mike Michael, and Genevieve Bell. The activities included range from psychogeographic explorations, to mask-making and live action role play techniques—tantalisingly brief in their descriptions, but all worth following up to understand better.

My final two selections both play with the forms of academic conferences and publishing themselves. It has been observed a few times over the years in different ways that design academia, at least as practised in conventional universities, very often does not seem to apply very much from its own research. We labour in university systems that are not co-designed, and barely even designed at all, while espousing the value of design. We talk about creativity, play, expression, constructivist epistemologies, while subjecting our students to centralised, bureaucratic systems of assessment modelled on quantifying learning outcomes. These two final papers describe experiments with doing something different. John Fass, Tyler Fox, and Alastair Steele’s The Echoing River (2022) made use of the venue of DRS 2022, in Bilbao, to run a 10-day “sonic placemaking” experiment in the city itself, via the new model of DRS Labs, with participants (local, and visitors) collaborating with local organisations to “activat[e] abandoned and overlooked public spaces in creative ways” through designing and creating installations and experiences using sound, materials, and spaces to reflect Bilbao’s histories and possible futures. I was one of those visitors during the conference—astonished by the amount of creative work and the kind of event that could take place during a design conference, an “experiential counterpoint” to the sitting in (albeit very stimulating of course) conference rooms and watched people’s PowerPoint presentations. The paper nevertheless demonstrates just how much work and organisation goes into this kind of endeavour.

Equally, and finally, I was taken by David Green, Joseph Lindley, Enrique Encinas, Mayane Dore, Jesse Josua Benjamin, and Spyros Bofylatos’s Ways of seeing design research: A polyphonic speculation (2023), which takes something of a meta-level approach to the form of how design research itself could be presented differently (and in much more designerly ways, frankly). Practically, the suggestion to think as much about research programmes—”emphasising the connective tissue” between individual projects (or indeed papers)—is very appealing to me. I won’t spoil the fun of reading the paper by explaining each of the authors’ six very creative ‘speculations’ here, but in opening up questions of how (and why) design research could be shared in new ways, they provide a useful point of reflexivity for how we might think about evolving the DRS Digital Library in the years ahead.

Whatever criticisms we might have of design’s over-belief in its ability to “save the world”, I still believe that designers, in general, do have skills that can enable people to share and externalise their thinking with others, and turn ideas into forms that people can engage with. We can help to prefigure plural possible futures, in the present, by actually enacting them, and that includes ways of teaching, learning, and investigating together as much as it does creating prototypes of products.

References from the DRS Digital Library

Cristina Ampatzidou, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, and Andrea Botero (2021). Feral Ways of Knowing and Doing: Tools and resources for transformational creative practice, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0016

Frederick van Amstel, Batista e Silva Sâmia, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa, Mazzarotto Marco, Ricardo Artur Carvalho, and Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto (2021). Insurgent Design Coalitions: The history of the Design & Oppression network, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada.https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0018

Jacob Buur, Mette Kjærsgaard, Franciska Fellegi, Sisse Schaldemose, and Tom Djajadiningrat (2023). Theory instruments: Helping designers see the invisible, in Holmlid, S., Rodrigues, V., Westin, C., Krogh, P. G., Mäkelä, M., Svanaes, D., Wikberg-Nilsson, Å (eds.), Nordes 2023: This Space Intentionally Left Blank, 12-14 June, Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden.https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.128

John Fass, Tyler Fox, and Alastair Steele (2022). The echoing river: A DRS 2022 Lab, in Lockton, D., Lloyd, P., Lenzi, S. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June – 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.863

David Green, Joseph Lindley, Enrique Encinas, Mayane Dore, Jesse Josua Benjamin, and Spyros Bofylatos (2023). Ways of seeing design research: A polyphonic speculation, in Holmlid, S., Rodrigues, V., Westin, C., Krogh, P. G., Mäkelä, M., Svanaes, D., Wikberg-Nilsson, Å (eds.), Nordes 2023: This Space Intentionally Left Blank, 12-14 June, Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.96

Sasha de Koninck and Laura Devendorf (2022). Objects of care, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June – 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.440

Lesley-Ann Noel (2020). Envisioning a pluriversal design education, in Leitão, R., Noel, L. and Murphy, L. (eds.), Pivot 2020: Designing a World of Many Centers – DRS Pluriversal Design SIG Conference, 4 June, held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.021

Other References

Paulo Freire (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (translated by Myra Bergman Ramos). New York: Seabury Press.

William Gaver (2012). What should we expect from research through design? Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 937–946. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208538

Corita Kent and Jan Steward (1992). Learning by Heart. New York: Bantam Books

Dietmar Offenhuber (2023). Autographic Design: The Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Elizabeth B-N Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers (2012). Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. Amsterdam: BIS.

New, funded PhD position

Imagination Infrastructuring: Exploring roles for generative creativity tools in participatory futuring, climate crisis, and societal transitions

I’m pleased to be able to offer a funded PhD, at TU Eindhoven here in the Netherlands! Are you interested in design’s potential to help us imagine better futures, in an age of climate crisis? And how the explosion in AI creativity support tools could offer new ways to open up and pluralise visions of transition? Apply before 26 November.

The official job advert is below, but I wanted to add a couple of comments here, since you’re a discerning and critical audience. I am aware that perhaps we don’t need another PhD jumping on what might seem a hype train—I very much envisage this PhD (especially since it is funded for 4 years) being able to work at a somewhat higher level, and cautiously while also creatively, rather than being too closely entangled in uncritical AI boosterism. I would expect a deep and serious engagement with the kinds of nuanced ethics work on AI in practice, being done by groups such as DAIR, and likewise with design justice, just transitions, and deeper questions about “participation” in design. TU/e is a technical university, and this PhD is funded by EAISI, but there is a strong thread of ethics running through the work. Please do get in touch if you have questions—d.j.g.lockton@tue.nl

This PhD position at TU Eindhoven focuses on exploring how the kinds of AI-based generative creativity tools which have emerged in recent years—and are rapidly developing—could contribute to ‘from the ground-up’ participatory futuring for communities, in an age of climate crisis. It is about investigating, via a designerly approach, the possibilities and potential of these technologies in use, as part of creative societal applications, rather than necessarily design or development of the technologies themselves, but depending on the PhD researcher’s interests, could combine these approaches. 

The urgent need for just societal transitions towards more sustainable ways of living, both environmentally and socially, is inspiring increasing interest from both academic researchers and social design practitioners in developing the idea of ‘imagination infrastructures’. Informed by considerations of adaptation to climate change, alternative economic models, social justice and societal change, these are initiatives and schemes to enable and support members of the public, including marginalised communities and neighbourhoods, to create and share actionable (or more broadly inspirational) visions and prototypes of alternative futures for everyday living.

The explosion in AI generative creativity support tools (e.g. at present, Midjourney, ChatGPT, etc—but with many more on the horizon) has, amidst all the hype, a potential to contribute here by enabling much greater democratisation and pluralisation of ‘professional’ image-making and presentation of ideas. On a practical level, for example, a community could produce its own highly plausible visualisations of alternative futures for its neighbourhood, perhaps to counter proposals from developers, or to offer visions of how a neighbourhood could adapt to climate change. Or, on a more broadly inspirational level, alternative imaginaries of future living, with new or culturally distinct aesthetics—including by community-trained or fine-tuned models—could be more easily brought into public discourse. Nevertheless, the ethical issues surrounding AI, from the biases and assumptions encoded in models and reproduced in their outputs, the potential effects on skilled jobs, entrenching further dominance of large tech companies, and intellectual property issues around creative work cannot be ignored.   

Within this space, the PhD researcher, in agreement with their supervisors, will have the opportunity to choose which directions to explore and address with their research. The topic draws from work on imaginaries, futuring (including experiential futuring), transformative practices, transition design, pluriversal design, participatory design and co-creation processes (including neighbourhood planning), design justice, research through design, speculative and critical design (and design fiction), and a growing literature in design and human-computer interaction (HCI) on (participatory) creativity methods and the use of AI-based generative creativity tools in practice. Depending on the focus of the project, domain knowledge on specific areas of sustainability will also be relevant, from climate adaptation to energy and mobility transitions (and the political and societal dimensions of these) to alternative economic models. Other creative practices, from illustration to storytelling, theatre, music, and facilitation, are also welcomed as relevant elements.    

Research questions and methods:

The main initial research question to be explored by the PhD researcher is:
– What could be the roles for AI generative creativity tools in participatory futuring, climate crisis, and/or societal transitions?

The question will lead to further sub-questions depending on how the focus of the project develops, for example around how these roles can be materialised in particular contexts or with particular groups or communities, or with identified outcomes in mind.

Over the course of the 4-year PhD programme, the researcher will engage in theory and practice, including writing up and disseminating insights in academic publication venues. The final year is expected to include the compilation of a thesis. It is assumed that a research-through-design methodology is most appropriate, including prototyping, iteration, and largely qualitative insights, but different approaches are welcome, as appropriate to the project. As initially framed, the project is not linked to specific societal partners or geographical contexts, but these may be involved as the project progresses, including linking to the emerging ‘imagination infrastructuring’ practitioner community internationally. The PhD may be structured as a series of smaller projects. Societal impact and knowledge exchange, for example through the development of a method or format for communities’ use of the tools, and/or public engagement through events, exhibitions, workshops, or short courses, could be a relevant element of the overall methodology.

The PhD will be linked to the new ‘Making With…’ research cluster at TU/e Industrial Design, and is funded by EAISI, the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute, which brings together AI activities from across TU/e.

Job requirements

• A master’s degree (or an equivalent university degree) in a design-related field (e.g., Interaction Design, Architecture, Industrial Design, Product Design, Service Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Graphic Design, Fashion Design) or another creative discipline.
• Previous experience with participatory methods, and community engagement will be an advantage, as will domain knowledge of social science and sustainability or transition concepts. Experience using creative AI tools, and an understanding of (or willingness to learn about) how they work, and an interest in the ethical and social justice issues associated with contemporary debates on the topic, will also be important.   
• Experience in project work (to be demonstrated through a portfolio).
• Proficiency in qualitative data-collection and analysis methods.
• Excellent communication skills in English, including writing. The ability to conduct fieldwork in other languages would be a plus, but there is no Dutch language requirement.
• A research-oriented attitude, openness, interest, and good soft skills to work closely with people from other disciplines and across organisations, and to learn from theory in the social sciences, humanities, environmental sciences, AI, or other fields.
• Willingness to engage in working practically with communities and members of the public.

See the full job advert for details of salary and employment conditions.

Climate Futures Now! Design United Dialogue at Dutch Design Week, 24 October

If you’re coming to Dutch Design Week on 24 October in Eindhoven, please join us for Climate Futures Now! at Microlab Eindhoven — an afternoon of playful activities and interactive projects from the four Dutch technical universities‘ Design United programme.

From 14.30 to 17.00 we’ll be exploring how designers can bring plural possible futures to life, in the present, in an age of crisis and change, from speculative design to participatory methods, with games, and an overall collective activity with visitors where we (hopefully) move from speculation to action:

• Games for the Redesign of Farming & Food Systems  – Federico Andreotti and colleagues, Wageningen University & Research
• Virtual River Game — Robert-Jan den Haan, University of Twente
• Future Narratives — Vere Vreeswijk, TU Eindhoven
• Democratised Future Visioning — Elke van Dael, TU Eindhoven 
• (Blue)Green Roof — Leon Peters + colleagues, University of Twente
• Unlocking Social Energy Through Relational Giving — Vicky Toellner, TU Delft   
• Powerless Politics — Nathalie Kamp, Youp Ferket, Floris Thoonen, TU Eindhoven
• Timeslip 2038 — Robyn Huiting and the Researching the Future Everyday course, TU Eindhoven
• Chair of the Future — Margot Beekhuizen, TU Eindhoven 

Register now — no DDW ticket required. The event is organised by Julieta Matos Castaño, Federico Andreotti, Eveline van Zeeland, Renee Noortman, Roy Bendor, and myself, with great coordination by Marijke Idema.

DRIVE Festival 2023—Collective Imagination for Transformative Futures: Design, Climate Change and Urban Transformations

Also during Dutch Design Week on 24 October in Eindhoven, Julieta Matos Castaño (University of Twente) and I will be running a workshop at ClickNL’s DRIVE Festival, an event bringing together the creative industries in the Netherlands with academic researchers. Our session, Collective Imagination for Transformative Futures: Design, Climate Change and Urban Transformations, is part of a day focused on Future Living Environments, co-organised with Design United:

How do we imagine transformative futures in everyday life in the Netherlands? In an era of urgency for some and apathy for others, what futures do we hope for, or envision, for our own communities or others—and how can we embrace our agency to bring about these transitions?

What if we could experience different versions of our own futures? Designers have the ability to create plausible versions of everyday life, with culture, social practices, challenges, interwoven with changes to our homes and cities, how we eat, travel, work, and care for each other, and interact with nature. How can we do this with communities?

In this interactive and experiential session, we invite a diverse group of researchers and practitioners to share experiences on the development and application of participatory futuring methods for facilitating community imagination in societal transitions. Our goal is to learn from each other and identify opportunities for future collaborations. To this end, we will encourage participants to share their dreams and aspirations for future projects and initiatives, collectively mapping a shared creative vision of the possibilities of this space. We will incorporate reflections on the prerequisites necessary to bring this future into reality.

The session will activate a network of societal stakeholders interested in participatory futuring activities, relevant for the Industrial Design department of Eindhoven University of Technology, and DesignLab at the University of Twente. We will document the results of the session as a first step for future collaborations on projects around societal transitions and urban transformation.

Reimagining Institutions

At the end of August I was honoured to be invited to give a talk at The Conference in Malmö, a wonderful event organised by Media Evolution, bringing together a really interesting set of people to “delve into the promises and pitfalls of human-machine-nature-and-more relationships.” My talk focused on reimagining institutions, as part of a great session led by Himanshu Rohilla, also including Anne Kaun from Södertörn University. You can watch the talk here (or below), and the Q&A too. Among so many thought-provoking conversations and presentations, The Conference reminded me just how much academia misses out when it so narrowly focuses on only the peer-reviewed-paper-type conference format (with all the stress of that process) as a way of sharing ideas and meeting people. I have been involved with my fair share of these, and they can be enjoyable and transformative, but the energy and life that can come from weaving curious people from different backgrounds together with no expectations of “an output” shouldn’t be underestimated.

Designing (for) Transitions and Transformations:
Imagination, Climate Futures, and Everyday Lives

A theme track at DRS 2024, the Design Research Society international conference, June 24th-28th, 2024, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA (and online)

Speaking of conferences, in the more academic vein, I’m part of a team organising a theme track at DRS 2024 exploring ‘Designing (for) Transitions and Transformations’. Full papers are due October 31st 2023—we’ve had some intriguing abstracts submitted so far. Essentially: keep an eye on this track at the conference (and in the DRS Digital Library next year) for some great work from around the world.

More details on the DRS 2024 website or in this PDF version.

Right, well, that’s a very long newsletter already, so I’ll stop there—but, hopefully, more regular updates, and more of a blogging routine, are on their way back.

Take care, look after each other
Dan

I’m not going to do a full end-of-year review post this year, since I’ve just been through a tenure process at work (TU Eindhoven) which has exhausted my desire to write any more about what I’ve been up to! But, briefly: current projects include IMAGINE and Playing With The Trouble, both of which are enabling some exciting collaborations with great people, and during 2022 I was elected to the executive board of the Design Research Society and became a Fellow of the Centre for Unusual Collaborations. I chaired the programme committee for the DRS 2022 conference in Bilbao and online, co-chaired workshops for ACM Creativity & Cognition in Venice, and represented TU/e in the Futuring theme of the Design United Transitions events at Dutch Design Week. At ACM DIS 2022, the Spooky Technology paper that Daragh Byrne and our CMU students wrote won Best Pictorial, and at DRS 2022 I co-chaired a theme track on Qualitative Interfaces, including a paper by Carine Lallemand, Daphne Menheere, and me exploring the ways we have applied the idea with students at TU/e and CMU. In the last part of the year I moved from Amsterdam to Utrecht. I’ve run talks / workshops / been on panels in Prague, London, Oslo, Trondheim, Bilbao, Milan, Lausanne, Brighton, plus online many other places, sent New Metaphors cards all over the world, and aside from all that, have taken a ghost story writing course, and continued compiling photos and details of the history of petrol stations. It hasn’t been a year when I’ve loved academia, but there are some good people, and I have to believe it’s all worth it.

I feel as though I’m in a state of flux around how best to develop new habits for blogging and sharing, as Twitter’s prolonged death spiral and increasing toxicity as a billionaire’s plaything removes much of the appeal of using it. I haven’t fully / properly engaged with Mastodon yet, but I will in time — I’m @danlockton@mastodon.social — but perhaps (as many people have said) this does mark a point of inflexion for blogging, proper blogging perhaps paired with newsletters and a resurgent RSS or ActivityPub to link all of it together. I think back to 2005–10 when I used to post multiple times a week in some cases (although often quite short blog posts), and it’s easy to see how in retrospect the rise of Twitter, plus changes in my work and life situations, contributed to blogging properly feeling like too much work, not appropriately matched to the circumstances, while Twitter felt right. But it doesn’t any more. So—I hope—in 2023 I will try to rebuild something of a better way of communicating, including consolidating and fixing the sprawling network of websites I have for different courses and projects, some of which are currently broken!

Take care, good wishes for 2023
Dan

p.s. subscribe to the newsletter—whatever it evolves into!

p.p.s. The images above were generated using Midjourney on 31/12/22 with the prompt “Utrecht Domkirke and Oudegracht overgrown with vines and trees on a sunny day, with red, yellow and orange flowers growing along the canalside :: extremely detailed with rich colors, Depth of Field, F/2.8, high Contrast, 8K, Cinematic Lighting, intricate details, extremely detailed, incredible details, full colored, complex details, Super-Resolution, Beautiful lighting, Accent Lighting, Global illumination –ar 3:2 –stylize 1000 –v 4” — thanks to Josie for exploring how to get the most out of it all!

It’s been too long since the last newsletter, back in those days before “all of this”. I didn’t even do one in 2020—the end of that year was just too fraught, too difficult. You’ve probably forgotten you’re even on this mailing list. In the past I used to write very long end-of-year reviews, for myself as much as for anyone else, but I’ll try to keep this relatively brief.

– In 2020, I moved from Pittsburgh to Amsterdam (via a few months in London), and am currently (for nearly a year now) working for TU Eindhoven’s department of industrial design, in the ‘Future Everyday’ group, as an assistant professor. I have kept a courtesy appointment at Carnegie Mellon, where I am still advising a couple of wonderful PhD/MDes students. At TU/e I’ve contributed so far as a coach to two ‘squads’ and a series of courses for Master’s students and undergraduates, and was privileged to exhibit Imagination Landscapes, a development of the Mental Landscapes project originated by Delanie Ricketts, at Dutch Design Week 2021 in TU/e’s Drivers of Change greenhouses. Elsewhere, I’ve been an external examiner for PhDs at RMIT Europe, and NTNU Trondheim.

– The Imaginaries Lab is now an independent entity, based in Amsterdam, which means I’m available for projects, consultancy, workshops, etc, separately from the bureaucracy of having to engage with a university. The focus is tools for imagining: helping people create and explore possible futures, and understand ourselves and the systems around us better—collective imagination and participatory futuring, through design. If you think we could work together, get in touch!

– New Metaphors is available to buy (again) from 1 January — the pandemic, my move across the world, Brexit, and Dutch VAT requirements complicated all of this in ways that are too boring to explain, but finally the card decks are on sale (and also free to download). This version, by Devika Singh, Saloni Sabnis, Michelle Chou, and myself, includes an updated introductory booklet—thanks to Stefania La Vattiata, Bhakti Shah, and Catherine Yochum, and everyone who shared their stories.

– Spooky Technology is also available to buy and download. Edited with Daragh Byrne from Carnegie Mellon, and designed and written by our students Katherine Giesa, Meijie Hu, Miranda Luong, Anuprita Ranade, Yiwei Huang, Catherine Yochum, Matthew Cruz, Gordon Robertson, Lisa (Yip Yan) Yeung, Christi Danner, Elizabeth Wang, and Karen Escarcha, with support from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and Carnegie Mellon’s College of Fine Arts, the book explores our understanding of the invisible technologies and entities in our everyday lives, from objects with ‘intelligence’ to systems that haunt and talk to us (and each other).

– My long-ongoing interest in old petrol stations (with the long Twitter threads) has finally crossed over into actual academic ‘energy humanities’ (kind of): some of my photos have been included in the Centre for Energy Ethics’ online Art of Energy gallery. My piece Remembrance Service captures everyday experiences and ephemera(lity) of petrol stations in the UK, over the 20th century, from the point of view of the motorist (or, as in many of the images included, from the perspective of a child—myself—in the back seat on long car journeys). Thank you to Sean Field of the University of St Andrews for the invitation.

– I did a lot of talks, workshops, and panels in 2021, mostly remotely, including: KAIST’s Symposium on Qualitative Phenomena, Data, Interface, and Representations (thank you to Chang Hee Lee for organising); on Transition Design for Masaryk University, Brno (thanks Roman Novotný); on metaphors and toolkits for Vassar College’s Creative Arts Across the Disciplines programme (thanks to Lisa Brawley); in conversation with Laura Forlano for London College of Communication’s Being Here: Materialising Experiences symposium (thanks to John Fass for the invitation—also for the interview in his new book with Tobias Revell, Ben Stopher, and Eva Verhoeven, Design and Digital Interfaces); participating in Northeastern University’s Center for Design ‘Conversation’ on the Physical Life of Data (thank you to Dietmar Offenhuber and Anjelica Montemayor); and on collective imagination, design, and futuring for the European Foundation Centre’s Annual Conference (thanks Cassie Robinson and Stefanos Oikonomou).

– At RSD 10, the Systemic Design Association’s conference at TU Delft (and online), Justyna Swat and I ran a workshop on ‘manifesting worldviews’ and Palak Dudani and I ran a dialogue exploring metaphors and systems, while the same week, I also took part in U+, the Plurality University Network’s 2021 international meeting in Amsterdam—with some interesting developments coming up for 2022 around collective practices for futuring and imagination.

– We’ve finally published an article about the Materialising Mental Health project, developed by Michal Luria, Ulu Mills, Jennifer Brown, Katie Herzog, Laura Rodriguez-Eng, Supawat Vitoorakaporn, Josh LeFevre, Carlie Guilfoile, Nowell Kahle, Kailin Dong, Jessica Nip, Aisha Ghei Dev, Katie Glass, Zhiye Jin, Soonho Kwon, Arden Wolf, and myself at Carnegie Mellon and subsequently also run as a set of activities at Mozfest 2019. The chapter is in Deborah Lupton and Deana Leahy’s new edited collection, Creative Approaches to Health Education. (Here’s an open-access preprint)

– As a member of the Design Research Society’s international advisory council, I’ve been involved as part of the programme committee for DRS 2022, which will be in Bilbao (including the Guggenheim as a venue) and online, next June¬–July. This also includes chairing a track, Valuing the Qualitative in Design and Data, with Carine Lallemand, Daphne Menheere, Chang Hee Lee, Marion Lean, Samuel Huron, Elisa Giaccardi, Dietmar Offenhuber, and Holly Robbins. I’m also (with Joel Chan) co-chair for workshops and tutorials at ACM Creativity & Cognition 2022, taking place in Venice, in June — please do submit your proposals, until 24 January.

– The Centre for Unusual Collaborations, an initiative of the alliance between TU Eindhoven, Wageningen University & Research, Utrecht University and University Medical Centre Utrecht, funded a ‘Spark grant’ collaboration between a group of ‘unusual collaborators’— Josie Chambers, Jet Vervoort, Joyce Browne, Joost Vervoort, Jessica Duncan, Raimon Ripoll-Bosch, Suzan Ruijtenberg, Maikel Waardenburg, and myself—with backgrounds across genetics, urban design, soil ecology, epidemiology, sociology, organisational studies, farming systems, and co-production—to explore how methods from games, and game mechanics, can be used to help collaboration between disciplines and different worldviews. Following an initial online workshop exploration (sketchnoted by Elvia Vasconcelos de Gouveia), we are hoping (if we’re successful with a larger grant) to develop this work much further in 2022.

– It’s been great to be involved this year in Juli Sikorska’s participatory experiential futures project Urban Heat Island Living, as both a participant, and a co-facilitator along with Francesca Desmarais, Ervin Parashumti, Geoff Mills, and John Robb. Centred on an imagined Berlin adapting to the aftermath (and continued presence) of increasingly extreme heatwaves, Urban Heat Island Living is an immersive experience exploring the effects of climate change on the lives of humans and other species, in current and future scenarios, combining design fiction, creative writing, improv, and public participatory futuring. As well as in-person events, we ran a ‘conference from the future’, Heat Resilient Cities 2039 as part of the UNTITLED Festival 2021. UNTITLED itself, with its programme of events and experiments, is a great initiative from Demos Helsinki, and it’s been enjoyable being a member for the past couple of years, including running sessions in 2020 with Tammar Zea-Wolfson and Sanika Sahasrabuddhe on participatory futuring and new metaphors.

Upcoming in 2022: two projects I’m leading at TU/e will both involve Imaginaries Lab-like topics, and have jobs attached:

– IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability (2022–24), led overall by OsloMet’s Nina Heidenstrøm, brings design schools and sociologists together to create experiential futures / speculative design around contested / debated aspects of futures of food / fashion / mobility, including ‘confrontations’ with the public (at DOGA, Oslo) and domain experts. A researcher job at TU/e should be advertised in early 2022.
– New Interfaces for Understanding AI (2022–25) is a PhD project I have had funded by the Eindhoven AI Systems Institute. The aim is to explore public understanding of AI through applying design research methods to the development of novel interfaces for explainable AI (XAI) from human perspectives—through, I hope, some more qualitative, material, and analogue methods. The paid PhD position should be advertised by TU/e in early 2022.

Look after each other, and best wishes for 2022
Dan
dan@imaginari.es
Amsterdam, December 2021

Over September–October 2020, a group of students from the Imaginaries Lab: Research Through Design class at Carnegie Mellon explored ways to investigate people’s thinking around maintenance in a broad sense, across a variety of areas from public transportation to digital archiving to sustainable lifestyle choices. Julia Cambre, Matt Nam, Miso Demko, Michelle Wang, Christianne Francovich, Amber Lee, and Saumya Sharma developed creative “(in)tangible thinking” methods which could be run online (largely using Miro and Figma, but also coded by students themselves), with some input along the way from experts working on the subject in different ways: Naomi Turner and Dr Laura James from Maintain / the Festival of Maintenance, Dr Nazl? Terzio?lu Özkan from Linköping University, and Cayla Key, Mozilla Foundation fellow at Northumbria University. Although maintenance was the topic, we were also focusing on developing (online) methods for investigating how people think about or understand things, and so the ways the projects resolved are probably as much about this as about the specifics of maintenance itself. (Much as I would have loved to do a class about actual ‘design for maintenance’, this was something different: an exploration of how people think about maintenance.) We’re grateful to be supported in this project by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.

At the end of October, we ran an online event with around 35 visitors from the US and Europe where people could try out the activities the students created, and the students gathered experiences from people. At present we are working on taking some of the activities further and writing them up for an academic conference.

In the meantime, though, here are the projects:

Julia Cambre‘s project Morbid Methods examined maintenance, repair, and the ends-of-life of ‘smart’ devices such as voice assistants, phones, and IoT devices—”what will happen to our smart devices over the long term? And more specifically, how might people conceive of the maintenance and lifecycle of these smart devices, and how might this differ from how they might behave towards conventional or non-smart devices?” The Morbid Methods obituaries, eulogies, and postmortems created by participants paint pictures of devices often protected and looked after by owners, but assumed to have ‘died’ often through software failure, updates not working, or simply displacement by newer models.

Matthew Nam looked at personal digital archiving, a way of maintaining memories for ourselves amidst the huge explosion in data we generate about our lives. His tool as demonstrated in the online event prompted people to find significance in the images (and thumbnails generated) in a folder they hadn’t looked at for a long time, via suggesting that each image be labelled with a title and a description, as if it were part of a card deck. A subtle colour shift was an additional prompt to consider the images as ‘historic’ within one’s own life.

Amber Lee, Christianne Francovich, and Miso Demko took on questions around understandings of transport system maintenance—a large and complex topic. Through designing and testing a multi-player board game in Figma, with an objective of “building” a well-maintained system, with roles such as rider (passenger), activist, transit system CEO, or city mayor (requires a card deck plugin for Figma to experience it), the team aimed both to explore how people understand the system, through how they played, and to use the game to educate players about “the different factors, stakeholders and trade-offs that exist in system maintenance”.

Saumya Sharma explored the idea of maintaining a (more) sustainable lifestyle—what are the many small decisions that must be made when prompted with different choices in everyday situations? Her Lasting Lifestyles activity (via a Figma board) asked participants to reflect on their current behaviours and practices, and then—taking inspiration from Adam Dant’s Modern Life Frustrations Test—placed them in different scenarios with conversations between two or more people around a sustainability-related choice, and prompted them to respond.

Michelle (Wanqiao) Wang examined how we maintain our digital workspaces, with a combination of both physical modelling, and a digital exercise, which looked at the patterns of people switching their focus among multiple devices/screens, and the reasons behind it. Michelle was interested in how people maintain information across working scenarios, and how the information flows among devices.

We also made use of our group of online participants to dig deeper into some of the metaphors commonly used around maintenance, and tried to come up with some alternatives, using a Google Slides version of the New Metaphors cards. Groups explored some alternative metaphors as inspirations, including (a selection):

bubbles, foam, or droplets as a way of thinking about individual and collective maintenance activities—perhaps a campaign that emphasises the “doability” of maintenance when done habitually

sunset or sunrise as a way of thinking about collective “spectating” of cycles—people enjoying watching the ongoing, endless rhythms of maintenance, knowing that others are part of the experience too

traces of use or previous messages as a way of seeing maintenance as part of the stories of objects or systems—other people’s roles, and adding our own parts of the story

windowsills and a noticeboard as metaphors for places for showing off what’s happening, even things we’re proud of, very publicly—but which can become messy over time, perhaps need tidying

grazing is a form of maintenance itself, but it was noted how the act provides the grazer with something it needs—are there ways we could think about other forms of maintenance like this? plant growth and roots were thought of in terms of their progression over time—something ongoing, constant, part of plants’ cycles of existence and not solely one-off ‘events’

Many thanks to everyone who joined us for the event for your enthusiastic participation and ideas!

Going further

The Festival of Maintenance, now Maintain, and The Maintainers are the go-to communities for explorations of what maintenance means in its many forms, from maker spaces, to infrastructure, to care, to craft, to open source software, in both practical and academic senses.

Reading list

Here’s a short list of some of the things we read, looked at, and were pointed towards. I’m grateful to Naomi Turner and Cayla Key for introducing us to many of these.

Maintenance and tech cultures of innovation

Deb Chachra (2015), Why I Am Not a Maker

Shannon Mattern (2018), Maintenance and Care and (2019), Minimal Maintenance

Ella Fitzsimmons (2018), talk ‘Tech, Polyphony & Power‘

Ursula K LeGuin (1986), The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Lee Vinsel and Andrew J Russell (2020), The Innovation Delusion

Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007), Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance

Care and repair

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds

Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto (1990), Toward a feminist theory of caring

Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese (2020), Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times

Nazli Terzioglu-Ozkan and Renee Wever (2019), Integrating repair into product design education: Insights on repair, design and sustainability

Nazli Terzioglu-Ozkan, Dan Lockton, and Clare Brass (2015), Understanding User Motivations and Drawbacks Related to Product Repair

Cayla Key and Audrey Desjardins (2019). REP(AIR): An Olfactory Interface For Bike Maintenance

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 a context, five undergraduates in the Design for Environments studio (Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Jackie Chou, Yuhan (Antonio) Song, Erin Ryan, and CJ Walsh) investigated bedtime routines, personal scheduling of time, focus, sleep data, and sleeping in non-traditional places.

Brief details of each project are given in the exhibition catalogue (2019) designed by Jackie Chou, while the five projects are explained in detail in this article for the ACM Designing Interactive Systems conference:

Dan Lockton, Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Jackie Chou, Yuhan (Antonio) Song, Erin Ryan, and CJ Walsh. 2020. Sleep Ecologies: Tools for Snoozy Autoethnography. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1579–1591. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395482. Free PDF download

We also have a short pictorial paper for the DIS 2020 Research through Design in Situ workshop, which Tammar Zea-Wolfson and Dan Lockton presented.

Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Dan Lockton, Jackie Chou, Yuhan (Antonio) Song, Erin Ryan, and CJ Walsh. 2020. RtD for Self-Inquiry: Sleep Ecologies. Position paper for DIS 2020 workshop: Tom Jenkins, Will Odom, Kristina Andersen, Andy Boucher, David Chatting, Bill Gaver (2020). RtD in Situ: Discussing the Domains and Impact of Design Research. DIS 2020, online. Free PDF download.

A team of Master’s students, Stefania La Vattiata, Aadya Krishnaprasad, Michelle Chou, Deepika Dixit, Jisoo Shon, and Matt Geiger, also explored some ways in which other elements of sleep ecologies, such as caffeine consumption, could be included as part of a suite or kit of autoethnographic probes.

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 video produced by Christian Svanes Kolding, introducing the concept. If you’d be interested in us doing a New Metaphors workshop at your IxD or UX or other event in 2020, let us know!

Models of emotion produced by participants at MozFest 2019, using the Emotional Modelling toolkit developed by Katie Herzog, Laura Rodriguez, Josh LeFevre, Nowell Kahle, and Arden Wolf. Photo by Ulu Mills.

Looking back on 2019

Happy holidays from the Imaginaries Lab! In 2019, our third year, we’ve pushed our work in a few new directions in collaboration with some great people. We’re still a very part-time lab within Carnegie Mellon, but I think we’re doing quite well at extracting opportunities from the situation we’re in.

I’m writing this from the UK, where I’ve just participated in the Design Research for Change Symposium at the Design Museum in London, organised by AHRC Design Leadership Fellow, Professor Paul Rodgers. This was a great event, showing a huge variety of design research from some wonderful researchers—from 3D printing with ocean plastics to a haptic data physicalisation ‘vibration’ interface for marine engines—and I’d recommend keeping an eye out for the proceedings, a beautiful, substantial piece of work, when they’re available online. Aside from enabling meeting and reconnecting with some brilliant people, the event also hit home for me just how much academic design research (and funding) in the US could learn from Europe. In the US, we are still often at the stage of trying to persuade people, often in our own universities, that design research is even a real thing, let alone that it might have applications to real-world challenges. But more on that another time.

Dan Lockton @imaginari_es presenting his work on Metaphors & Imaginaries in #design at the @AHRCDesignLF @ahrcpress #Design Research for Change (DR4C) Symposium at the @DesignMuseum @ImaginationLanc @LancasterFASS @LancasterUniRES pic.twitter.com/3TMd7YbwcN

— Paul Rodgers (@paulstweet) December 11, 2019

Climate Pathways

Megan Urban, Lea Albaugh, Julia Petrich, Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Elena Deng, Judy Chun, Antonio Song, Sharon Lee, Coco Allred, Joyce Wang, Yixiao Fu, Yingli Sieh, Chris Costes, Ema Karavdic, Cathryn Ploehn, Shawn Koid, David Lin, Rachel Kim, Matt Prindible, Matt Geiger.

How do we imagine the climate crisis? In an era of urgency for some and apathy for others, where Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump are ‘thought leaders’ in very different ways, what futures do we understand, or can we envision, for our own communities or others? It’s easy to be completely overwhelmed with powerlessness, and the complexities and uncertainties of the situations we might have ahead of us. International bodies such as the IPCC, and climate science researchers, have developed the idea of plural ‘pathways’ which give insights into possible futures for humanity, but what could they look like in everyday life? How might we actually experience these pathways? Interdisciplinary student teams from Carnegie Mellon, part of the Imaginaries Lab studio course Research Through Design, tackled these questions from a variety of directions this semester. Over three weekends, a month apart, we took inspiration from the notion of climate pathways and explored the issues through team projects which each came to focus on specific facets of everyday life, with our Pittsburgh setting providing a local focus for some projects.

Download the exhibition catalogue (PDF) for more details on the projects:

• SCENTREES: How can we train our senses to detect changes in air quality?
• COLLAGING SHARED WORLDS: How can people have improved conversations with
  loved ones about the climate crisis?
• #CLOSEDLOOPCLOSET: What would be our relationship with our clothes once we opt out
  of fast fashion?
• CARBONCASH: Can we close the intention-action gap through financial incentives or
  environmental impact information?
• A QUEST FOR THE GOOD MEAL: What we learned by designing an experiential quest that
  exposed the disengaged (yet environmentally interested) to a stewardship worldview

Over the three weekends and in between, we were lucky to have had guest speakers and visiting critics, in person and remotely, including Katja Budinger (Fjord), Charlotte Kessler (Queensland University of Technology), Stuart Candy (Carnegie Mellon), Györgyi Gálik (Design Council and Royal College of Art), and Muireann McMahon and Niall Deloughry (University of Limerick), and, as part of the Plurality University Network’s Many Tomorrows Festival, we had a collaborative creative charrette with Elliott Montgomery’s students at Parsons School of Design in New York, ‘Rebuilding the ship as we fly it’. We’d like to thank all our guests and visitors, and also to Chloé Luchs-Tassé and Lara Emond from the Plurality University Network, Meg Richards and David Gerritsen from Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center, and to Stef LaVattiata and Michelle Chou from the Imaginaries Lab for their help. Above photo by Jackie Chou.

Tangible Thinking

What does it look like when we bring together modelling methods from design, art, and data physicalisation, to materialise not just envisioned ‘things’, but qualitative or abstract or invisible ideas and relationships? In October, at the Systemic Design Association’s RSD 8 conference at IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, Dan Lockton and Matt Prindible (MDes) from Carnegie Mellon joined Manuela Aguirre Ulloa and Palak Dudani (AHO, Oslo), Lisa Brawley (Vassar College), John Fass (London College of Communication), and Laura Forlano (IIT Institute for Design) to run an afternoon workshop, Tangible Thinking. With a great group of participants from industry, academia, and the public sector, we carried out what we described as “a scaffolded series of playful experiments animated by some serious concerns”, using multiple ‘tangible tools’ to help explore shared understanding of shifting fields of knowledge and practice, the relationships between people, and the temporal qualities of experience.

What this meant in practice was a fun afternoon of using materials (including our Mental Landscapes kit) with different degrees of metaphorical and actual properties, to build collective models, or perhaps miniature installations, in which the ‘areas’ of expertise of people present, the properties of the relationships between ideas, and the dynamics of those relationships over time emerged through the materials used. Our workshop slides are here for reference—a paper is in preparation, and a larger group of us are aiming to develop aspects of what we learned. Here our application was around knowledge and interdisciplinarity, but the wider scope of using materials to enable intangible ideas to be made tangible has a huge amount of potential, and we’d love your involvement if you have interesting ideas or applications.

MozFest: Materialising Mental Health

Also in the “making the intangible tangible” vein, in October, Ulu Mills (MDes), Jen Brown (Senior Graphic Designer, University Advancement), and Dan Lockton ran a workshop at the Mozilla Festival (MozFest) at Ravensbourne in London. MozFest is an international gathering of educators, activists, technologists, researchers, artists, and young people dedicated to creating a better, healthier internet. As part of the Festival’s Neurodiversity space, curated by the Mozilla Foundation and the BBC’s CAPE Neurodiversity initiative, Materialising Mental Health built on projects from 2018’s Imaginaries Lab elective New Ways To Think, developed further to enable public engagement activities. Visitors to MozFest were invited to use a range of modelling materials with different sensory properties, to express emotions, feelings, aspects of mental health, wellness, self-care, or other intangible-but-important elements of thinking and experiencing the world.

A shared Empathy Rock Garden proved a very popular installation, growing over the course of the weekend, and visitors could also create Personalized Potions which capture a picture of emotional needs and wellbeing (building on work by Ulu, Jen, Michal Luria (HCII) and Supawat Vitoorapakorn (BDes)), build personal sculptures embodying hard-to-describe emotions (using elements of the Emotional Modelling project by Katie Herzog, Laura Rodriguez, Josh LeFevre, Arden Wolf, and Nowell Kahle), and use Mental Landscapes to create ‘landscapes’ for neurodiverse teams or discuss team culture in a physical form.

An updated version of our Materialising Mental Health booklet was designed by Jen Brown for the event—download it here. Thanks to Sean Gilroy, Lucie Daeye, Leena Haque, and everyone else who helped put together the event, and Tammar Zea-Wolfson back in Pittsburgh for updating and expanding both the Emotional Modelling and Mental Landscapes kits.

EPIC: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference

Other news

• In November, the Imaginaries Lab hosted Györgyi Gálik from the Design Council for a Steiner Lecture in Creative Inquiry in collaboration with the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. Thanks so much to Golan Levin, Bill Rodgers, Tom Hughes, and Linda Hager for their help in arranging this.
• We’re also pleased to have been able to welcome during 2019, in person and via video, guests including Muireann McMahon and Niall Deloughry (University of Limerick), Anne Spaa (Northumbria University), Helen Fisher (Lab4Living), Roxanne Leitão (Central Saint Martins), Iohanna Nicenboim (TU Delft), Katja Budinger (Fjord), Ian Hargraves (Mayo Clinic), Thomas Jun (Loughborough University), Charlotte Kessler (Queensland University of Technology), and Kathryn Anthony (University of Illinois).
• The weekly seminar that Marysol Ortega and Dan Lockton teach for Carnegie Mellon’s new PhD design students and second-year MDes students has, this year for the first time, a very comprehensive week-by-week chronicle put together by Hannah Koenig as well as a collection of final articles on Research for/into/through Design(ing) which cover everything from gestural design to rhizomatic data visualisation.
• Universal Methods of Design, the widely adopted design research methods reference by Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington (now head of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design), has been expanded and revised, with 25 new methods. I’m pleased to have been able to contribute chapters on metaphors, data physicalisation, and behavioural design (using some CMU student projects among other examples) alongside some other new methods from CMU colleagues
• Alumni Lucas Ochoa and Gautam Bose—whose Emoto AI project with Marisa Lu started as a project for the Environments Studio—created the amazing Teachable Sorter at Google’s Creative Lab. What’s a fun project extracting marshmallows from cereal is also a really well explained tutorial on building your own hardware machine learning project.
• Congratulations to Dan’s advised PhD and MDes students who graduated in 2019! Kakee Scott (committee: Dan Lockton, Ramia Mazé, Cameron Tonkinwise; external reader: Laura Forlano) and Stephen Neely (committee: Jonathan Chapman, Dan Lockton, Cameron Tonkinwise; external examiner: Thecla Schiphorst) completed their PhDs, while Gray Crawford (advisors: Dan Lockton, Daragh Byrne) and Katie Herzog (advisors: Stacie Rohrbach, Dan Lockton) got their MDes.
• Thanks to Bettina Nissen and the Design Informatics team at the University of Edinburgh for hosting Dan for a talk in May, just before CHI.

Coming up in 2020: DIS Student Design Competition, More-Than-Human-Centred Design

Just a brief note for 2020: Dan is co-chairing the new ACM DIS 2020 Student Design Competition, with Bart Hengeveld of TU Eindhoven. We’re looking for projects that respond to the question: What can design offer when we move beyond human-centredness? We are looking for exciting demonstrations that show creativity, inspiration, and critical reflection, addressing how design might help establish a posthuman coexistence, and move beyond human-centredness. This could be through re-centreing nature, animals, plants, fungi, things, objects, robots, cyborgs, non-human technological intelligences, places, the Earth itself or more complex assemblages of human and non-human in thought-provoking designs—or even reconsidering the often-unquestioned individual-centredness of current human-centred design practice. What can considering the more-than-human, or more than just humans, provoke? How does coexistence take place? Is there even ‘centredness’ when designing towards human-technology symbiosis?

The aim is that participants can submit current work or existing projects, or create something new. If you know students who might be interested in showing their work at DIS 2020 in Eindhoven in July, the submission deadline is 28 February 2020.

Thank you and welcome

Thanks to all our Master’s and undergraduate research assistants, and independent study students throughout 2019, for all your hard work: Devika Singh, Saloni Sabnis, Gray Crawford, Lucas Ochoa, Rachel Alexander, Jay Huh, Katie Herzog, Zach Bachiri, Stef La Vattiata, Matt Geiger, Deepika Dixit, Aadya Krishnaprasad, Jisoo Shon, Michelle Chou, Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Mia Manavalan, and Erin Ryan—and welcome to our new RAs for spring 2020: Catherine Yochum, Bhakti Shah, and Shambhavi Deshpande. Thanks too to teaching assistants Joe Hines, Laura Rodriguez, and Hannah Koenig.

MozFest 2019 visitors make their personalised potions, facilitated by Jen Brown. Photo by Ulu Mills

Work with us

As always, we’re looking for international collaborators, particualrly where we could work together to develop new tools or apply them in contexts where they’re useful. Please do get in touch (danlockton@cmu.edu) if you might be interested in doing something together!

And best wishes for everyone for 2020. The world’s in a hell of a state, and we need new ways to think if we’re going to make our way to better futures. Take care of each other.

Dan Lockton (and Bella, see below)

2019 publications from the Imaginaries Lab

• Delanie Ricketts and Dan Lockton (2019). Mental Landscapes: Externalizing Mental Models Through Metaphors. Interactions 26, 2 (March 2019), 86-90.
• Erin Ryan (2019). hi how r u: Understanding Modern Digital Communication. Booklet produced for EPIC 2019: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, Providence, RI.
• Joanna Boehnert, ?dil Gaziulusoy, Dan Lockton, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Matt Sinclair (2019). Introduction: Power and Politics in Design for Transition. ADIM 2019: Academy for Design Innovation Management, 19–21 June 2019, London.
• Gautam Bose, Marisa Lu, Lucas Ochoa, and Dan Lockton (2019). Emoto: From Phone to Emotive Robotic AI Sidekick. TEI 2019: ACM Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interactions. March 17-20, 2019, Tempe, AZ.
• Chang Hee Lee, Dan Lockton, John Stevens, Stephen Jia Wang, SungHee Ahn (2019). Synaesthetic-Translation Tool: Synaesthesia as an Interactive Material for Ideation. CHI 2019: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts, 4–9 May 2019, Glasgow.
• Dan Lockton, Devika Singh, Saloni Sabnis, Michelle Chou, Sarah Foley, Alejandro Pantoja (2019). New Metaphors: A Workshop Method for Generating Ideas and Reframing Problems in Design and Beyond. C&C 2019: ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition. 23–26 June 2019, San Diego.
• Dan Lockton, Michelle Chou, Aadya Krishnaprasad, Deepika Dixit, Stefania La Vattiata, Jisoo Shon, Matt Geiger, Tammar Zea-Wolfson (2019). Metaphors and imaginaries in design research for change. DR4C: Design Research for Change Symposium, 11-12 December 2019, London.
• Dan Lockton, Lisa Brawley, Manuela Aguirre Ulloa, Matt Prindible, Laura Forlano, Karianne Rygh, John Fass, Katie Herzog, Bettina Nissen (2019). Tangible Thinking: Materializing how we imagine and understand interdisciplinary systems, experiences, and relationships. Workshop at RSD8: Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium 2019, 17–19 October 2019, Chicago.
• Dan Lockton, Gray Crawford, Devika Singh, and Shengzhi Wu (2019). Electric Acoustic: Exploring Energy Through Sonic & Vibration Displays. CHI 2019: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts, 4–9 May 2019, Glasgow.
• Dan Lockton, Devika Singh, Saloni Sabnis, Michelle Chou (2019). New Metaphors: A Creative Toolkit for Generating Ideas and Reframing Problems. Pittsburgh & Dawlish: Imaginaries Lab, ISBN 978-0-9565421-2-0 (print) ISBN 978-0-9565421-3-7 (PDF)
• Dan Lockton (2019). Reifying through Design(ing). Paper for CHI ’19 Workshop, Doing Things with Research through Design: With What, Whom, and Towards What Ends? CHI 2019: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 4–9 May 2019, Glasgow.
• Dan Lockton (ed.), Megan Urban, Lea Albaugh, Julia Petrich, Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Elena Deng, Judy Chun, Antonio Song, Sharon Lee, Coco Allred, Joyce Wang, Yixiao Fu, Yingli Sieh, Chris Costes, Ema Karavdic, Cathryn Ploehn, Shawn Koid, David Lin, Rachel Kim, Matt Prindible, Matt Geiger (2019). Climate Pathways: Projects from the Imaginaries Lab. Pittsburgh & Dawlish: Imaginaries Lab, ISBN 978-0-9565421-4-4.

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 in the years ahead. We’re using creative approaches to envision alternative ways of thinking and living, now and in the future, to inform interdisciplinary research and practical applications for social and environmental benefit. Our goal is to become a world-leading center for this kind of research, collaborating internationally to support transformative innovation. We carry out research projects, publish and run workshops internationally, teach studio classes, and build collaborations externally and within Carnegie Mellon.

What does the Imaginaries Lab do?

The lab’s basic premise is that 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. We create those tools through developing creative research methods, adapted from those used in design practice, and explore their use in a variety of cross-disciplinary contexts.

⇧ Imaginaries Lab research team, December 2018—upper row left-to-right: Devika Singh, Gray Crawford, Aadya Krishnaprasad, Rachel Gray Alexander; lower row left-to-right: Michelle Chou, Saloni Sabnis, Dan Lockton, Bella

In 2018, the Imaginaries Lab team, including — over the course of the year — Devika Singh, Matt Prindible, Gray Crawford, Saloni Sabnis, Silvia Mata-Marin, Rachel Gray Alexander, Shengzhi Wu, Katie Herzog, Michelle Chou, Ashlesha Dhotey, Aadya Krishnaprasad, and Dan Lockton (as well as Bella), have worked on a range of projects in three main areas:

█  Imaginaries, mental models, and mental imagery: using design methods to investigate how people understand abstract or complex concepts (from mental health to energy to metaphor generation to the structure of disciplines themselves), help them understand and imagine in new ways, and imagine new ways of living. This research covers the development of creativity methods, workshop and facilitation methods, and new kinds of interface design (human-computer interaction) and qualitative data visualization.

█  Research through design, and design as inquiry: investigating the use of design practice as a form of research and creative inquiry, including how to teach design studies through critical making, speculative and critical design, and how design methods can contribute to new knowledge generation beyond the design discipline itself.

█  Design for behavior change: exploring the links between designed technology and influence on human behavior, particularly in relation to sustainability and social benefit, and how designers can practically engage with issues of ethics and effects in this area. The Design with Intent toolkit is one of the most highly-cited pieces of work in this field, both academically and through use in design practice, but how is the field evolving in the light of mass surveillance, individual behavioral profiling, and weaponized behavioral economics?

In practice these areas have been woven through projects with a range of themes — new methods for design and creativity, new types of interface, intelligences, and futures.

New methods for design and creativity
Among our projects exploring what we might loosely call ‘new methods for design and creativity’, New Metaphors has seen the most development during 2018, with workshops at Interaction 18 in Lyon, UX Lisbon, Plurality University’s Founders’ Meeting in Paris, a keynote at Interaction Latin America in Rio de Janeiro (Dan Lockton), and numerous sessions at Carnegie Mellon including a workshop for the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and a dSHARP Digital Humanities talk. A metaphor is just a way of expressing one idea in terms of another, often used in design to introduce people to new ways of doing things, by relating them to familiar ideas, from desktops, files and windows, to the net, web, websites and browsers, cloud storage, even blockchain. Many of these are so familiar now that we perhaps no longer even think of them of as metaphors. But they are not inherently ‘right’; they can be challenged — including creating novel metaphors, which can persuade us to think differently and accept new ideas, or help us reframe the ways we think at present. The New Metaphors workshop format is a simple juxtaposition approach using cards and a variety of structured worksheets — or Devika Singh‘s Inspiro SMS bot — but can generate ideas applicable to a wide range of domains within and beyond design and futures.

⇧ A New Metaphor generator

⇧ Interaction Latin America 2018 keynote, ‘New Metaphors’

In November, Michelle Chou, Saloni Sabnis, Devika Singh and Dan Lockton ran a DIF On Air session for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Disruptive Innovation Festival on ‘New Metaphors for Design, Economies, and the Systems of Everyday Life’ (video below). The team, facilitated by Laura Franco Henao, discussed how — inspired by the metaphor inherent in the circular economy — other kinds of metaphors could help give us an expanded conceptual vocabulary around economies and our relationships with products, reframing them for more sustainable ways of thinking.

⇧ Michelle Chou, Saloni Sabnis, Devika Singh and Dan Lockton, hosted by Laura Franco Henao, for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation DIF 2018

The New Metaphors project offers a form of intentional apophenia — deliberately provoking oneself to see patterns or relationships or parallels where (perhaps) none actually exists but where proceeding as if it does offers us some new way of thinking or interesting angle for seeing the world differently. This has some overlap with the ‘event scores’ of the Fluxus movement, for example the pieces collected in Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit — which led to Dan Lockton taking part in the Disruptive Improvisation workshop at CHI 2018 in Montreal, organized by Kristina Andersen, Laura Devendorf, James Pierce, Daniela Rosner, and Ron Wakkary. The New Metaphors method, introduced via a short paper called ‘Apophenia As Method—Or, Everything Is Either A Metaphor Or An Analogue Computer’ was tried out at the workshop along with a wide range of other generative and experimental techniques, collected in a zine. We intend to develop this direction further in more work, since the potential of ‘apophenia as method’ has interesting implications for the intersection of machine learning and creativity in particular. More on this next year.

⇧ New Metaphors at the CHI 2018 Disruptive Improvisation: Making Use of Non-Deterministic Art Practices in HCI workshop in Montreal

Other work from the lab in 2018 on new methods for design and creativity included: Dan’s participation in the Sketch Model Summer Workshop at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA, in June, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in which a wonderful group of people from technology, humanities, and the arts, led by Sara Hendren, Benjamin Linder, Jonathan Stolk, Deb Chachra, and Jonathan Adler, explored interdisciplinarity and how to bring both critical and creative methods into engineering education; and a paper applying ideas from R D Laing and Gregory Bateson in the context of investigating people’s understanding of systems, presented by Dan at the (new) Systemic Design Association‘s RSD 7 conference at Politecnico di Torino in October, followed by a fascinating ‘de-conference’ at the Monviso Institute in Ostana.

⇧ Left: Sketch Model Summer Workshop at Olin College; Right: The systemic design community explores Ostana, Piedmont

Sarah Foley presented her new method for designers to rethink services and human-technology relations, Service Fictions through Actant Switching, at the Design Research Society’s DRS 2018 conference in Limerick in June. The paper was developed from Sarah’s MDes thesis (advised by Dan Lockton and Cameron Tonkinwise) and offers an approach combining actor-network theory, design fiction, and service design to generate speculative, provocative ideas for the future of services.

⇧ Left: Sarah Foley presents her Service Fictions project at DRS 2018; Right: Drinks in Limerick after the DRS 2018 Designing for Transitions track.

Also at DRS 2018, Dan Lockton joined Joanna Boehnert (Loughborough University) and Ingrid Mulder (TU Delft) to chair a full-day track, Designing for Transitions. Building on work around Transition Design emerging from Carnegie Mellon, but also other systemic approaches to designing with wider social and environmental change in mind, the ten papers in the track explored an expanded field for design research seeking to engage with change at scale in time and place. Our editorial provided an overview of some issues and challenges in the field as we see it developing. As part of the track, Dan Lockton and friend of the Lab Stuart Candy‘s paper ‘A Vocabulary for Visions’ brought together many of the themes of imaginaries, futures, and new metaphors that underpin the Lab’s work. We covered (briefly) a set of concepts which can be thought of as seven ‘ways of seeing’, for tackling the ‘visionary’ aspect of designing for transitions—lenses, imaginaries, backcasting, dark matter, circularity, experiential futures, and new metaphors—drawing on work by a range of people and different disciplines. Dan Lockton was also a member of the Conversations committee for DRS 2018, and a discussant at PhD by Design Limerick.

⇧ Electric Acoustic installation, CMU Design Week, spring 2018

New types of interface
A big theme through our work is exploring new kinds of interface design, through various perspectives including a more qualitative approach. One such project this year is Electric Acoustic (Shengzhi Wu, Gray Crawford, Devika Singh, Dan Lockton) which explores data sonification — turning data into sound — as an alternative way to engage with patterns in energy use data. Building on Dan’s previous Powerchord project (developed with Flora Bowden at the RCA), Electric Acoustic is supported by Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts’ Fund for Research and Creativity, using data provided by CMU Facilities Management Services. Following a public engagement workshop at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum in fall 2017 for Pittsburgh Maker Faire, we have built a multi-modal prototype also incorporating cymatics (vibration displays), which we installed in May 2018 during CMU Design Week. Cymatic displays seem to offer some interesting possibilities for more qualitative ways of representing the effects of phenomena and their interactions with each other, and we’re hoping to explore this further in some different contexts.

⇧ Ubiquitous Inclusion, by MacKenzie Cherban

⇧ Silent Scene, by Chang Hee Lee

In general, shifts in sensory experiences for interaction design have been an area of lots of interest for people in our community this year. MacKenzie Cherban‘s MDes thesis, Ubiquitous Inclusion (advised by Dan Lockton) examines the design process and the role of technology in relation to the d/Deaf community, through building on the affordances of sign language (ASL) and participatory futuring, arriving at an ecosystem connecting ‘future artifacts’ developed from participants’ ideas, including a ‘machine learning for personal use’ approach to the smart home (above left), trained using Wekinator. Dr Chang Hee Lee — who passed his PhD at the RCA this October! —  (supervised by John Stevens and Dan Lockton) has been investigating synaesthesia and design for the last four years, and as a development from this work created Silent Scene (above right), an exploration of “zero interaction” as a playful mode of experience. In the grand tradition of Claude Shannon / Marvin Minsky’s Ultimate Machine, Silent Scene is “a stationary device that appears to do nothing. However, when there are no humans in its environment — when no sound, motion, or light is detected — it secretly starts to create beams and rays of stunning colors. The device will not function if anyone is near it.” Here’s Chang’s DIS 2018 abstract with Dan Lockton and Ji Eun Kim, and a write-up in Interactions‘ Demo Hour. Dr Lee’s fellow RCA Innovation Design Engineering PhD researcher — and medical practitioner — Dr Dave Pao (also supervised by John Stevens and Dan Lockton) is continuing with his redesign of electronic medical record interfaces for doctors, to use a more visual, qualitative style which enables not just better usability but also higher self-perceived clinician competence.

⇧ Dixon Lo’s ShapeShift demo

⇧ CHI 2018 presentation of Dixon Lo’s Experiential Augmentation project (presented by Dan Lockton)

How can we make use of the affordances of virtual and augmented reality — spatial computing more widely — to create new kinds of interface, with new possibilities for understanding, rather than just adapting existing paradigms? Dixon Lo‘s CHI 2018 paper, based on his MDes thesis Experiential Augmentation (advised by Stacie Rohrbach and Dan Lockton), examined qualitative indexical visualizations for AR building on our learned understanding of physical phenomena in the real world, from shadows to floating, arriving at recommendations for designers working in this space. Dan presented Dixon’s paper (see video). A very different approach is being taken in Gray Crawford‘s thesis project, Assimilating Hyperphysical Affordances (advised by Dan Lockton and Daragh Byrne), in which he is exploring neuroplasticity in relation to “more unorthodox physical phenomena” in VR — can we learn to interact in ways which are very different to the real world? Are there opportunities for new kinds of interfaces?

Working on raymarched hands in VR, seeing how UI might be directly incorporated into / emerge from the body

Super satisfying how grabbed objects fuse with the body —
mirrors a bit how we mentally assimilate tools into our body schemata@LeapMotion @kevinwatters @compositeredfox pic.twitter.com/XZXahGZfop

— Gray Crawford (@graycrawford) October 19, 2018

⇧ A demonstration of one of Gray Crawford’s experiments

Intelligences
Another theme running through our work this year has been around ‘intelligences’ and the questions of other minds (whether human, animal, or artificial). Within Carnegie Mellon, we’re situated in (and saturated with) an environment strongly flavored with AI development — and indeed, increasing consideration of ethics via an initiative funded by K&L Gates — but interaction design’s engagement with the changing intelligences around us has a lot of potential for critical and generative exploration and development.

⇧ Projects on show at Where Are the Humans in AI?, May 2018 — the class show for the Environments Studio ‘Intelligence(s) in Environments’

Dan Lockton’s 2018’s junior Environments Studio class Intelligence(s) in Environments — Maayan Albert, Gautam Bose, Emma Brennan, Cameron Burgess, Aisha Dev, Anna Gusman, Monica Huang, Soonho Kwon, Marisa Lu, Jessica Nip, Lucas Ochoa, and Helen Wu — examined intelligence of different kinds, from social interaction to theory of mind to everyday interaction with AI, through practical projects and guest talks focused on investigating, understanding, and materializing intelligence and other invisible and intangible qualitative phenomena and relationships (covered by Chris Togneri here). An excellent group of projects included investigating how people see different web services as analogous to rooms in their home (Maayan Albert), communal spaces as manifestations of others’ thought processes (Emma Brennan), communicating intangible emotions with computers via poetry and sculpture (Monica Huang), physicalizing moral codes and decision-making (Aisha Dev), new visual approaches to end-user programming (Cameron Burgess), Wekinator-trained voice control of 3D modeling (Anna Gusman), and a VR Museum of Taste (Soonho Kwon). See all the projects here. The highest profile project, Emoto AI, by Marisa Lu, Gautam Bose and Lucas Ochoa offers an alternative embodiment for phone-based virtual assistants such as Siri, enabling them to transform into a ‘sidekick’ (see also Michal Luria‘s work) making use of nonverbal communication cues through expressive motion. Emoto AI received an honourable mention in the Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards 2018 and a paper, ‘Emoto: From Phone to Emotive Robotic AI Sidekick’ by Gautam Bose, Lucas Ochoa, Marisa Lu and Dan Lockton has been accepted to TEI 2019‘s work-in-progress track.

⇧ Emoto AI Sidekick by Marisa Lu, Gautam Bose and Lucas Ochoa

 
The Environments Studio projects received a range of guest critique throughout, including a visit from Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic, and culminated with a three-day show, Where Are The Humans in AI?, in May 2018, following which Cameron Burgess, Emma Brennan, Monica Huang, and Gautam Bose exhibited their projects at Data & Society’s Future Perfect event in New York, organized by Ingrid Burrington.

⇧ Emma Brennan and Cameron Burgess demonstrate their projects at the Data & Society Future Perfect event, New York

Going in depth on a specific dimension of our interaction with other intelligences, Meric Dagli‘s MDes thesis Designing for Trust (advised by Dan Lockton and Daragh Byrne) examined interaction design for trust in the context of multiple chatbots — developing designs guidelines for maintaining and increasing trust in scenarios where multiple virtual e-commerce agents collaborate with each other. Meric won a Kynamatrix Research Network Innovation through Collaboration Grant for his project.

The major question of ‘other minds’ is, of course, how can we ever know how each other thinks? How can we understand other people’s thought processes and emotions, when we have no way of experiencing others’ experiences? In some ways, much of the Lab’s work is about externalizing imaginaries and mental models, or developing tools for imaginaries to be externalized, to enable sharing and discussion. One field where this approach has a particularly practical application is in mental health — using design methods to help people think about and explore creative ways to describe, talk about, and share our own often invisible experiences. According to research compiled by the Wellcome Trust (UK), “one in four people will experience a mental health problem in any given year”, and “75% of people with a mental health problem develop it before the age of 24”. Sales of books on anxiety are “soaring”. Carnegie Mellon students, in common with many people in high-pressure environments, can experience a broad range of mental health issues.

⇧ Projects from New Ways to Think: Materializing Mental Health

Yet as a society, we don’t always have good ways of talking about mental health. In New Ways To Think: Materializing Mental Health, an eight-week research studio run by the lab, undergraduates, Master’s students, and PhDs from CMU’s School of Design, School of Art, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Tepper School of Business, and Integrated Innovation Institute explored how we can adapt participatory design and facilitation methods, often used in user experience, service design, and working with communities, to a mental health context. We believe they have the potential to help people capture qualitative dimensions of their experiences, to make them palpable, to enable discussion, reflection, and peer support. Our initial focus has been working within the Carnegie Mellon community, including receiving very valuable input from the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services, but we hope that the methods developed can be of use more widely through further development. Four projects — Lexicon of Feelings (Aisha Dev, Kailin Dong, Katie Glass, Zhiye Jin, Soonho Kwon, and Jessica Nip), Emotional Modeling (Laura Rodriguez, Katie Herzog, Josh LeFevre, Nowell Kahle, and Arden Wolf), Empathy Rock Garden and Personalized Potions (both by Jen Brown, Carlie Guilfoile, Michal Luria, Uluwehi Mills, and Supawat Vitoorakaporn) — each work with different aspects of mental health, from anxiety and stress to loneliness, to enabling feelings that perhaps don’t have a name yet to be expressed and shared. We are currently working on finding ways to publish what we’ve done so far, and take some of this work further.

Futures
‘New ways to live’ is a dimension of the Lab’s work that brings together imaginaries of futures and some of the design for behavior change work on which Dan’s research was founded. The basic premise is that if we can develop better ways of helping people imagine themselves living and acting differently then this makes larger-scale behavior and practice changes for sustainability easier to achieve, ultimately, for humanity and for the planet. (We draw here on some of the experiential futures framing developed by our CMU colleague Stuart Candy.) Starting in November 2018, with a short course called New Ways To Live: Future Pittsburgh — and continuing in 2019 with a publication project, lab researchers Rachel Gray Alexander and Saloni Sabnis, with students Aisha Dev, Kailin Dong, Monica Huang, Soonho Kwon, Jessica Nip, Nicole Pinto, Tamara Amin, Jen Brown, Jeffrey Chou, Katie Herzog, Laura Kelly, Michal Luria, Ulu Mills, Laura Rodriguez, Devika Singh, and John Zoppina (undergrads, Master’s, PhDs, and staff, from Design, Environmental Engineering, Psychology, Business, Human-Computer Interaction, Professional Writing, and University Advancement) have been developing projects exploring the Pittsburgh of 2030 — speculative (but well-informed) scenes from possible future everyday life and work in the city, shot through a more realistic lens of the kinds of small businesses and cultural phenomena that are present here rather than the entirely shiny visions of automation that are sometimes proposed. This could be relevant to many rust-belt cities in the US, and former industrial towns elsewhere too. More on this project in due course.

The Imaginaries Lab, represented by Dan Lockton, is excited to be a founding member of Plurality University (U+), a Paris-based global collective “that detects, connects, and federates people or organizations who mobilize the resources of the imaginary to broaden the scope of thinkable futures: activist artists and sci-fi authors, speculative designers, reflexive utopians, creative futures thinkers, engaged researchers, etc”. We’re in some excellent company and looking forward to building on ideas developed at the founders’ meeting in Paris at the end of November.

⇧ Plurality University Founders’ Meeting, New Metaphors workshop

Looking ahead

We’re actively seeking collaborations, projects where we can contribute, and opportunities to apply for funding together. We’re also pretty experienced at running workshops, short courses and projects in both commercial and academic contexts. If you’re interested in any of the ideas or methods we’re working on, or think we might be able to work together in 2019, internationally or within the US, please do get in touch. As we look to the future, the Lab is exploring the options for new funding models, host institutions and partners, inside and outside of academia.

Other activities from the Lab in 2018

Finally, we should mention some of the other activities the Lab’s been involved with in 2018. We’ve been pleased to welcome guest speakers for the classes we run, both in-person and virtually, including Simone Rebaudengo, Bruce Sterling, Jasmina Tesanovic, Emily LaRosa, David Danks, Madeleine Elish, Deepa Butoliya, Jill Simpson, Tobias Revell, Cennydd Bowles, Viviana Ferrer-Medina, Cheryl Dahle, and Emily Blaze — thank you all for your time. Dan Lockton and Ahmed Ansari’s MDes Seminar III class have published a great set of articles about the research they’re doing. Dan Lockton has talked about the Lab’s work for TEDx University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute (thanks to Brad Myers), IxDA Pittsburgh (thanks to Simon King), CMU’s dSHARP digital humanities group (thanks to Scott Weingart), CMU School of Architecture’s ‘Introduction to Ecological Design & Thinking’ (Dana Cupkova), and for London College of Communication’s MA Communication Design (thanks to Tobias Revell). In terms of professional service, Dan has been an Associate Chair for the CHI 2018 Design subcommittee, an invited discussant at PhD by Design in Limerick, a jury member for the IxDA Interaction Awards 2019, and a guest critic / respondent for CMU School of Architecture’s EX-CHANGE in May 2018. PhD advisees Chang Hee Lee (RCA), Michael Arnold Mages (CMU) and Deepa Butoliya (CMU) have all passed and are embarking on academic careers, at the RCA, Northeastern, and Stamps (University of Michigan) respectively.

We’ve published a bit during the year, mostly at conferences:

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who’s helped this year, and all the students and participants in our projects and classes, to event organizers who’ve taken us all over the world, to Carnegie Mellon colleagues who’ve understood what we’re trying to do, and to our long-suffering families. Happy New Year to all: 2019 will be better.

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 share our own often invisible experiences. We’re sharing our work-in-progress here for #worldmentalhealthday2018 (October 10).

We’re living in fraught times. According to research compiled by the Wellcome Trust (UK), “one in four people will experience a mental health problem in any given year”, and “75% of people with a mental health problem develop it before the age of 24”. Carnegie Mellon students, in common with many people in high-pressure environments, can experience a broad range of mental health issues. Yet as a society, we don’t always have good ways of talking about mental health.

In New Ways To Think, we’re exploring how we can adapt participatory design and facilitation methods, often used in user experience, service design, and working with communities, to a mental health context. We believe they have the potential to help people capture qualitative dimensions of their experiences, to make them palpable, to enable discussion, reflection, and peer support. Our initial focus is working within the Carnegie Mellon community, including receiving very valuable input from the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services, but we hope that the methods developed can be of use more widely through further development.

The four projects currently in progress are Empathy Rocks, Lexicon of Feelings, Personalized Potions, and Emotional Modeling. Each works with different aspects of mental health, from anxiety and stress to loneliness, to enabling feelings that perhaps don’t have a name yet to be expressed and shared. Students developing the projects include undergraduates, Master’s students, and PhDs from CMU’s School of Design, School of Art, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Tepper School of Business, and Integrated Innovation Institute.

You can keep up to date with the projects on the New Ways To Think studio page, and see some examples of related work in this area on our resources page. Thank you to Dr Viviana Ferrer-Medina (CMU) and Jill Simpson (University of York) for their insights and help. For more information, and any comments or suggestions, please get in touch: danlockton@cmu.edu

Empathy Rocks

Jen Brown, Carlie Guilfoile, Michal Luria, Ulu Mills, Supawat Vitoorapakorn

Empathy Rocks project sets out to address a common feeling of being alone in your worries and anxiety. By encouraging people to express what is currently weighing them down, the project allows people to relate to others and express empathy. The project results in a collective representation of negative emotion and empathy through cairns and rock stacks.

The installation is currently in progress, and is intended to be placed in a library, where people are naturally quiet and can silently interact and reflect on their feelings. Passersby are guided to take a rock and write something that is weighing them down, or take a small rock, and place it near another one that is already on the surface as a symbol of empathy. We use a round surface for the rocks to encourage people to walk around it and to think about other people’s anxieties while they reflect on their own. Over time, these expressions of emotion and empathy stack up and create empathy rock cairns.

Lexicon of Feelings

Aisha Dev, Kailin Dong, Katie Glass, Nicole Jin, Soonho Kwon, Jessica Nip

Common words are difficult to apply to everyone in the same way. We come from different places, languages and contexts and each have our own associations with the relatively narrow set of words we use to express ourselves. How can we better express ourselves to others? How can we find more clarity in the abstract?

Lexicon of Feelings is an interactive installation that creates a space for people to engage with their mental health in a non-traditional way. Through 5 different stations, people are challenged to use abstract words, shapes, colors, textures, forms, etc. to bring clarity and understanding to how they feel in the present.

This installation aims to create new vocabulary to express feelings associated with mental health. This is a participatory design project that encourages everyone to create his/her own piece individually to express his/her mental state. At the same time, every individual “lexicon of feelings” contributes to our public community installation to allow people to share their thoughts with others and gain insights. Participants are encouraged to follow the guide below at each station:

Stations

1. Your Feelings In 3 Words
   How are you feeling at the moment, today or recently?
   Write down 3 words you are feeling.
   
2. Mash-Up!
   Mash-up, scramble your 3 words to invent a new word — your own feeling-language. Write yours on the line of the foam board.
   
3. What does your word feel like? Look like? Sound like?
   Feel free to pick the materials provided and explore textures, colors, shapes, forms, etc. Show us what your word feels like and put the materials on your foam board.
   
4. Annotate your “feeling definition” so others can navigate your piece!
5. Pin up your vocabulary.

Lexicon of Feelings encourages people to reflect on their own mental health in a private way while leaving a public artifact. Using different materials, combining existing language, and creating a new vocabulary maintains a sense of individuality and validates feeling that are difficult to express. Lexicon of Feelings creates a collection of new words that are deeply personal and unique, while also drawing parallels within the CMU community.

Emotional Modeling

Laura Rodriguez, Josh LeFevre, Nowell Kahle, Arden Wolf, Katie Herzog

As each of us knows from personal experience, communicating our emotions can sometimes be difficult and intimidating—particularly during times of stress. To that end, we’ve developed a kit that we hope can provide users with an outlet for visualizing their mental or emotional state, both as a means of self-reflection and as a way of sharing their feelings with others (if desired.)

The kit includes a variety of 3-dimensional shapes in a range of colors and materials (including wood, felt, and concrete) that can be connected to form abstract sculptures. We chose to focus on providing a relatively streamlined palette in order to avoid overwhelming users with options and encourage intentionality in their shape and material choices. Our intent is to provide participants with the space to create these sculptures in a private setting, giving them the option to anonymously share a photo of their final product as part of a collection.

Our hope is that in creating these sculptures, participants might experience a sense of catharsis and have an opportunity for meaningful reflection. We believe this non-verbal process of ‘externalization’ could allow some participants to express their emotions in new ways, as the sculpture they create might act as a totem of an otherwise deeply personal feeling. Further, we hope that some participants will feel comfortable sharing an image of their sculpture as part of a larger collection, which will in turn allow people to connect with one another through their creations, feel a sense of community, and encourage a broader dialogue about emotional and mental health.

Personalized Potions

Jen Brown, Carlie Guilfoile, Michal Luria, Ulu Mills, Supawat Vitoorapakorn

During times of stress, it becomes challenging to take actionable steps to move out of a stressful state. To address this, we’ve developed a light-hearted, facilitated interactive experience that allows participants to identify and process their stress through the creation of “personalized potions”:

1. Participants receive a clear glass vial. They are prompted to think about what a potion could help them accomplish in the near future. The participants write down their concern on the potion’s label.
2. They the fill the vial with “ingredients” (in the form of colored sugar) that will help them towards their stated goal. The ingredients boast names like “Compassion”, “Trust”, “Discipline”, among others, with one wild card ingredient they can name as they see fit. As they fill their vials, the facilitator writes the contents on the label.
3. Once the vial is filled, the final step is an “activation”: like any good potion, it doesn’t work without a phrase or an action. Participants are free to write whatever they believe to be an actionable first step, or they can draw an inspirational phrase from a bag: “Don’t try so hard.” “Breathe.” “Get some rest.”
4. The facilitator finishes the label and gives the potion to the participant as a keepsake for continued reflection.

The project is freeform and individualized in subject; participants can use the activity to address whatever aspect of their own mental health that they choose, however big or small. The goal is to give them an opportunity to express self-compassion, and to pause and reflect on what they need for their own well-being.

The experience in its final form will be conducted at a kiosk in an area of student housing on a university campus, where interactions can be relaxed and fun. The mid-October timing helps in two ways: tensions can be high during the middle of the semester, but it’s also a prime time to leverage Halloween as an aesthetic to support the experience.

We conducted a preliminary test in an office setting to great success. Participants interacted with the ingredients in various ways: some spent careful time choosing them, while others immediately knew exactly what they wanted. Some worked through their reasoning aloud while others pondered internally. All were glad to be able to take their potion home, with one participant saying, “This is a nice motivational thing to keep around here.”

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., Wu, S. (2019). ‘Electric Acoustic: Exploring Energy Through Sonic & Vibration Displays’. CHI EA 2019: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, extended abstracts, Glasgow. (paywall version: doi:10.1145/3290607.3313014 / free self-archived version PDF)

‘Energy’ is an abstract concept, invisible except through its effects, yet with vast geopolitical and environmental consequences—while driving many everyday practices. Designs seeking to influence people’s energy use have become common. Yet energy is a curious ‘material’ to work with for designers. In its many forms, it has characteristics which make it possible to experience—including its own ability (if not quite ‘agency’) to make other things do things.

One underexplored direction is designing ways to experience energy use through ambient sound—a form of sonification. There is no obvious ‘right’ set of dimensions for mapping energy to sound, so a process of iterative research-through-design exploration can make a contribution to theory.

In Electric Acoustic, we have built on work on sonification, including Dan Lockton’s previous work with the Powerchord project, but also explored vibration itself as a medium for experiencing energy, specifically electricity use. Cymatic displays, in which vibrations cause resonance patterns to emerge in liquids or powders (Chladni figures) have artistic and scientific applications but have not been explored much in design. In this research-through-design project we are building a series of prototypes which transform electricity use data into forms of sound and vibration using light and water, and a working, interactive installation in which the electricity use of the location itself, and people’s use of devices, feed into creating new ambient sound and vibration patterns. The project argues that these materialisations enable deeper engagement with invisible systems and infrastructures of everyday life, and offers these new media as examples for designers engaging in this space. Following a public engagement workshop at the Children’s Museum, for Pittsburgh Maker Faire 2017, we have built a multi-modal prototype which was installed in May 2018 at CMU Design Week, in Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, using electricity data from the building itself. An animation of the building, using the windows as a ‘graphic equaliser’ for electricity use over the day, complements the sonic and vibration components.

“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 time of the power of the imaginary to affect human affairs. Not for the first time, of course — but amplified in an unprecedented way by algorithms, bots, targeting, and strategic use of personal data via social media — huge decisions are being influenced by imagined versions of what ‘reality’ is.

We cannot avoid trying to work out how to make sense of terms such as alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth as being part of everyday discourse, and incorporating them and their effects into our own models of how the world works. As Maciej Ceglowski says, people “will happily construct alternative realities for themselves, and adjust them as necessary to fit the changing facts,” and this is greatly aided by the technological infrastructures being employed by those who want to control public opinion. The powerful are, as always, those who can create the simplest, easiest to spread, most superficially persuasive images, myths, conceptions, metaphors, frames, cause-and-effect pairings, and indeed stories, in the public mind. We shouldn’t be surprised: it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, in other eras, using different means, and we all know the outcomes of that. Fictions are political, and they matter.

Shared fictions as central to society

If I were better informed by sociological theory, I could make more insightful points here about Arjun Appadurai’s consideration of “the imagination as a social practice… a form of negotiation between sites of agency (‘individuals’) and globally determined fields of possibility”, or about the concept of imaginaries in a sociotechnical sense — the specific concept developed by Sheila Jasanoff, Sang-Hyun Kim, and others around the ways in which certain dominant ‘shared’ visions of societal futures centred around certain types of (technological) progress have effects on what happens in the present — “representations of how the world works — as well as how it should work”. It’s arguable that understanding our shared (or not) visions of what climate change, or artificial intelligence, or immigration, or identity, or law, or ‘sovereignty’, or even countries themselves, are, are all important in understanding our current situation and trajectory, but also that historically, these have had potentially vital roles in the ways in which human civilisations and societies developed. Yuval Noah Harari suggests that “Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination”, and that this is partly due to the emergence of the ability to describe the imaginary in language, to “transmit information about things that do not exist at all… entities that [people] have never seen, touched or smelled.”

“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1962.

Design and imaginaries

The idea of design (and art more broadly) as being a different form of language which can also describe the fictional or imaginary, making it real enough to be addressable, to be considered and critiqued and reflected on, is interesting. Design has the power to make visible and tangible imagined ‘better‘ (or worse) situations, to design artefacts as ‘tokens of better ages’, to apply ideas of utopia as a method, and to inspire and open up vistas – if not always actual maps — towards different futures, through speculation and design fiction. What do designers do, if not, in some sense, give us experiential pockets of imaginaries — both our own, reflected back at us, and visions of different futures, fictional at present? I find Clive Dilnot’s notion of design simultaneously stating “This!” and asking “This?” to be quite a clear way of thinking about this, because the ‘This?’ implicitly allows for speculation which is critical, which we may interpret as warnings or at least provocations to think further about what consequences might be of the proposition in question. By making our own imaginaries (more) visible, and doing the same for others’, whether new or old, design can be a translator between minds and ideas and the world. This is where I see that design essentially makes fictions matter (dual meaning intended).

“Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?”
Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism, 1867

There can be a self-fulfilling nature to imaginaries, as the Thomas Theorem implies. If we believe something to be real, and act as if it is real, and build institutions and infrastructures around that ‘reality’, the effect may be the same as if it had been real in the first place. Fictions become fact. For example, Stephen Metcalf discusses the self-fulfillingness of imagining society as a market: “The more closely the world can be made to resemble an ideal market governed only by perfect competition, the more law-like and “scientific” human behaviour, in the aggregate, becomes.” In a design context, the idea of a kind of circular causality in which designers’ imaginaries (models, or even stereotypes, we might say), of people’s lives end up being designed into systems which then effectively make those imaginaries real is not uncommon (I looked briefly at this kind of effect in this piece for the recent Science Gallery Dublin staging of Design and Violence.) There’s something here close to Anne-Marie Willis’s idea of ontological designing, or various formulations of the “We shape our X, and then our X shape us” idea by Churchill/McLuhan/Bill Mitchell and others — we shape our imaginaries, and then, through acting on them, designing systems around them, designing systems as if they were real, they shape our actions.

Understanding understanding

In design, human-computer interaction, and human factors research, both academic and applied, we often investigate the mental models people have, or appear to have, when they are using a piece of technology, or a system. We try to find out how they think something works, or how they expect it to work, from driverless cars to government, to heating systems, to website structure, and, learning from those insights, try to (re)design those systems, or at least interfaces to those systems. The redesigns either try to match better how people think something works, or — more rarely but more interestingly — change those models.

“When we don’t know how a thing works, we make it up”.
“We can only trust something if we think we know how it works”.
Louise Downe, Chicken Shops, Platforms and Chaos, 2013 (now Head of Design for the UK Government).

Most of the research I’ve done over the last ten years, which started in questions of how people’s behaviour is influenced by the design of the products, services, and environments they use, has moved towards something much more around using design methods to understand people’s situations, the social and environmental contexts in which people live and make decisions, how they are thinking about what they’re doing and the world more widely, and what agency they have to change things. Understanding understanding (or at least trying to) — investigating how people imagine and make sense of the world — seems as though it ought to be central to any form of design research which claims to be human-centred, and the generative, or future-facing complement is enabling people to have new understandings, new imaginaries. If you’ve followed any of my more recent work, it’s been a kind of patchy way of gradually — driven by the opportunities afforded by different funded projects and teaching needs — addressing some of these questions of current and new imaginaries, from investigating mental imagery and new kinds of display for energy, to forms of design fiction as a way of enabling students to explore consequences and ambiguity, re-imagine what interactions with AI could be, and materialise invisible phenomena.

“The future is not empty. The future is loaded with fantasies, aspirations and fears, with persuasive visions of the future that shape our cultural imaginaries.”
Ramia Mazé, ‘Forms and Politics of Design Futures‘, 2014

What the Imaginaries Lab aims to do

Part of my reason for joining Carnegie Mellon a year ago was the opportunity to build a research (and teaching) platform which explores exactly these kinds of ideas in a more structured way, through a design lens. The Imaginaries Lab is small, and so far internally funded at Carnegie Mellon, but since the start of 2017, a team of graduate research assistants and I have been looking at people’s imaginaries of local government in Pittsburgh (and their agency in relation to it), ways of externalising mental imagery through landscape metaphors, and approaches to new kinds of qualitative interface. We had a ‘soft launch’ in May, during Carnegie Mellon’s Design Week, and in the coming year will be expanding and continuing these projects and developing new collaborations and directions. One of these already announced is Electric Acoustic, a situated energy sonification installation funded by the Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts, but there are also some other interesting ideas in the pipeline.

So, what’s the vision for the Lab? I see us concentrating on two big (linked) challenges: New ways to understand, and New ways to live. In both cases, we’ll be creating tools to support people’s imagining, both what they already imagine (which is still important), but also helping people imagine in new ways. What starts as fiction can become real, explorable, experiential. We will be creating new fictions, but also creating tools to help people understand and deconstruct the fictions that are already having an effect on them. The Lab’s work cannot help but be political: questions of understanding and futures are inextricable from questions of worldview, belief in how the world is and how it should be.

New ways to understand encompasses ideas such as creating new metaphors (to use Mary Catherine Bateson’s term), new kinds of interface, new ways of explaining and visualising systems and the relationships between ideas, and using design methods to help people have agency to use these new ways of understanding. This builds on projects such as Powerchord, Drawing Energy, Qualitative Interfaces, Mental Landscapes, Materialising the Invisible, and aspects of Civic Visions, taking some of these ideas in new directions and finishing or consolidating some of the work we have already done. One particular domain that seems especially worth exploring from a design point of view is imaginaries around artificial intelligence and automation — to offer some ethical perspectives that could help designers working in the field, but also to “develop alternative narratives to technological futures” in Dunne & Raby’s words. More widely, new ways to understand could have a substantially activist stance, helping counter the intentional fictions of the post-truth world and giving people agency to challenge and change things, in their communities and beyond.

New ways to live is more explicitly about linking imaginaries to everyday life (and indeed changes in practices and behaviours) through prototyping new ways of living — and helping people imagine new ways of living, both at a household and societal level (thus linking more explicitly to the ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ notion in sociology as discussed earlier). What is it like to live in a different way, with different premises to your everyday routines? How can design fictions that you can actually use (or live ‘in’), together with new tools for understanding the world, affect what you do? This builds on the work I did around living labs and design for behaviour change, intersecting with some of the ideas in Carnegie Mellon’s transition design research area, and learning from the experiential futures work of futurists such as my new Carnegie Mellon colleague Stuart Candy. ‘New ways to live’ is going to involve some bigger kinds of projects, with more ambitious goals.

As a Lab, we will grow slowly — I don’t want to be spending the entirety of my time looking for funding for the next project — but one of the things that excites me about doing this is that it is, in itself, an exploration of the power of imaginaries. Putting the lab’s name on the office door and in my email signature, and treating it as a real thing within the university and externally, has made it a real thing, in a way which was refreshingly simple. It’s not now a fiction, but once upon a time, it was — as with every other design project and every other human endeavour. We can bring different worlds into being.

Parts of this article are based on talks I have given this year at Cornell University (the Hillier Lecture) and at the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago.

I’d like to thank Delanie Ricketts, Theora Kvitka, and Nehal Vora for their work with the Lab on its first few projects and wish them the best of luck in their new careers, thank Sarah Foley for her summer research work on service fictions, welcome back Ashlesha Dhotey and Silvia Mata-Marin, and also welcome our new research assistants joining this fall, Devika Singh, Matt Prindible, and Shengzhi Wu. Thanks too to Sebastian Deterding for putting me on to the Thomas Theorem, which expresses succinctly something that otherwise would have led to a rambling explanation on my part, and to Cameron Tonkinwise and Peter Scupelli for encouraging me to put the name on the door.

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’ mean? There is a long history of attempts to create artificial intelligence — and even to define what it might mean — but the definitions have evolved over the decades in parallel with different models of human intelligence. What was once a goal to produce ‘another human mind’ has perhaps evolved into trying to produce algorithms that claim to ‘know’ enough about how we think to be able to make decisions about us, and our lives. What we have now in ‘intelligent’ or ‘smart’ products and environments is one particular view of intelligence, but there are others, and from a design perspective, designing our interactions with those ‘intelligences’ as they evolve is likely to be a significant part of environments design in the years ahead. Is there an opportunity for designers to explore different kinds of interactions, different theories of mind, or to envisage new forms of intelligence in environments, beyond the dominant current narrative?

Building on the first two projects’ treatment of how humans use environments, and how invisible phenomena can be materialized, for this project the brief was to create an environment in which visitors can experience different forms of ‘intelligence’, through interacting with them (or otherwise experiencing them). The project was not so much about the technical challenges of creating AI, but about the design challenges of enabling people to interact with these systems in everyday contexts. So, quick prototyping and simulation methods such as bodystorming and Wizard of Oz techniques were entirely appropriate—the aim was to provide visitors to to the end-of-semester exhibition (May 4th, 2017) with an experience which would make them think, and provoke them to consider and question the role of design in working with ‘intelligence’.

More details, including background reading, in the syllabus.

We considered different forms of behaviour, conversation, and ways of thinking that we might consider ‘intelligent’ in everyday life, from being knowledgeable, to being able to learn, to solving problems, to knowing when not to appear knowledgeable, or not to try to solve problems. If one is thinking about how others are thinking, when is the most intelligent thing to do actually to do nothing? Much of what we considered intelligent in others seemed to be something around adaptability to situations, and perhaps even adaptability of one’s theory of mind, rather than behaving in a fixed way. We looked at Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences, with the ideal of interpersonal, or social, intelligence being one which seemed especially interesting from a design and technological point of view — more of a challenge to abstract into a set of rules than simply demonstrating knowledge, a condition where the feedback necessary for learning may not itself be clear or immediate, and where the ability to adjust the model assumed of how other people think is pretty important. How could a user give social feedback to a machine? Should users have to do this at all?

Each of the three resulting projects considers a different aspect of ‘intelligence’ from the perspective of people’s everyday interaction with technologies in the emotionally- and socially-charged context of planning a party or social gathering, and some of the issues that go with it.

Gilly Johnson and Jasper Tom‘s SAM is an “intelligent friend to guide you through social situations”, planning social gatherings through analysing interaction on social networks, but which also has Amazon Echo-like ordering ability. It’s eager to learn—perhaps too eager.

Ji Tae Kim and Ty Van de Zande‘s Dear Me, / Miyorr takes the idea that sometimes intelligence can come from not saying anything — from listening, and enabling someone else to speak and articulate their thoughts, decisions, worries, and ideas (there are parallels with the idea of rubber-duck debugging, but also ELIZA). In this case, the system is a kind of magic mirror that listens, extracts key phrases or emphasised or repeated ideas, and (in conjunction with what else it knows about the user), composes a “letter to oneself” which is physically printed and mailed to the user. Ty and Ji Tae also created a proof-of-principle demo of annotated speech-detection that could be used by the mirror.

Chris Perry‘s Dialectic is an exploration of the potential of discourse as part of decision-making: rather than a single Amazon Echo or Google Home-type device making pronouncements or displaying its ‘intelligence’, what value could come from actual discussion between devices with different perspectives, agendas, or points of view? What happens if the human is in the loop too, providing input and helping direct the conversation? If we were making real-world decisions, we would often seek alternative points of view—why would we not want that from AI?

Chris’s process, as outlined in the demo, aims partly to mirror the internal dialogue that a person might have. Pre-recorded segments of speech from two devices (portrayed by paper models) are selected from (‘backstage’) by Chris, in response to (and in dialogue with) the user’s input. There are parallels with “devices talking to each other” demos, but most of all, the project reminds me of a particular Statler and Waldorf dialogue. In the demo, the devices are perhaps not seeking to “establish the truth through reasoned arguments” but rather to help someone order pizza for a party.

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, and in dialogue with, qualities of phenomena, and relationships between them. Yet, quantification has become a default mode for information display, and for interfaces supporting decision-making and behaviour change.

There are more opportunities within design and human-computer interaction for qualitative displays and interfaces, for information presentation, and an aid to help people explore their own thinking and relationships with ideas. Here we attempt one dimension of a tentative classification to support projects exploring opportunities for qualitative displays within design.

This blog post is a slightly edited version of a late-breaking work submission presented at CHI’17, May 06—11, 2017, Denver, CO, USA, and published in the CHI Extended Abstracts at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053165

Download this article as a PDF.

Water trapped in train carriage door is a form of qualitative display of the train’s acceleration, deceleration and inertia.

Introduction

Outside of the digital, we largely live and think and act and feel in response to, and in dialogue with, the perceived qualities of people, things and phenomena, and the relationships between them, rather than their number.

Much of our experience of—and meaning-making in—the real world is qualitative rather than quantitative. How friendly was she? How tired do I feel right now? Who’s the tallest in the group? How windy is it out there? Which route shall we take to work? How was your meal? Which apple looks tastier? Which piece of music best suits the mood? Do I need to use the bathroom? Particularly rarely do we deal with quantities in relation to abstract concepts—two coffees, half a biscuit, three children, but rarely 0.5 loves or 6.8 sadnesses.

And yet, quantification has become the default mode of interaction with technology, of display of information, and of interfaces which aim to support decision-making and behaviour change in everyday life [27]. We need not elaborate here the phenomena of the quantified self [36, 42] and personal informatics more widely [24, 12], except to note the prevalence of numerical approaches (Figure 1) and the relative unusualness of non-numerical, pattern-based forms (Figure 2).

But what might we be missing through this focus on quantification? It seems as though there might be opportunities for human-computer interaction (HCI) to explore forms of qualitative display and interface, as an approach to information presentation and interaction, as an aid to help people explore their own and each other’s thinking, and specifically to help people understand their relationships and agency with systems.

In this article, we discuss qualitative displays and interfaces, and attempt one dimension of a tentative classification supporting design projects exploring this space.

Leaves as a qualitative interface for the wind

What could qualitative displays and interfaces be?

Here we define a qualitative display as being a way in which information is presented primarily through representing qualities of phenomena; a qualitative interface enables people to interact with a system through responding to or creating these qualities. ‘Displays’ are not necessarily solely visual—obvious to say, perhaps, but not always made explicit.

Before exploring some examples, we will look at some theoretical issues. The terms ‘qualitative interface’ or ‘qualitative display’ are not commonly used outside of some introductory human factors textbooks, but forms of interface along these lines are found in lots of projects at CHI, TEI, DIS, Ubicomp (all academic human-computer interaction conferences) and other venues, without authors explicitly drawing our attention to the concept—it is perhaps just too obvious and too broad to merit specific comment in HCI and interaction design research. But, assuming the idea does have value, what are some characteristics?

A human face is a qualitative interface, perhaps the earliest we encounter [e.g. 40] along with the voice. We learn to read and interpret emotions in others’ expressions, to recognize commonalities and differences across people, to make inferences about internal and external factors affecting the person, and monitor the effects we or others are having on that person. We understand that the face and voice and our ability to read them are abstractions, interpretations, not perfect knowledge, but a model which enables us to make decisions in conjunction with our reading of our own emotions.

In a sense, the whole world, as we perceive it, is a very complex qualitative interface. The most accurate model of a phenomenon is the phenomenon itself, but it is only useful to us to the extent we can understand what we are observing, detect the patterns we need to, and recognize that we are constructing the ‘reality’ we perceive. We are always creating a model [14] and that model is necessarily not reality itself; all displays of information are representations of a simplified model of phenomena in the world. Levels of indexicality [32], drawing on Charles Peirce’s semiology, are relevant here, addressing the “causal distance” between the phenomenon and how it is displayed.

One advantage of interfaces seeking to provide a qualitative display is that they have the potential to enable the preservation of at least some of the complexity of real phenomena—representing complexity without attenuating variety [2]—even if we do not pay attention to it until we actually need to, in much the same way as certain phenomena in the real world become salient only when we need to deal with them. Looking out of the window or opening the door to see and feel and hear what the weather is like outside presents us with complex phenomena, but we are able to interpret what actions we need to take, in a more experientially salient way than looking at some numbers on a weather app.

The feel of the wind on our skin, or watching the wind affect the environment, gives us a better sense of whether we need a scarf or coat than knowing the quantitative value of the wind speed and direction (Figures 3, 4 and 5). We can see, hear and feel not just wind speed and direction, but other qualities of it—is it continuous? in short gusts? damp, dry?

Qualitative displays could enable us to learn to recognize patterns in the world (and in data sets), and the characteristics of state changes, similarly to benefits identified in sonification research [35]. We should consider that ‘qualitative’ does not simply imply the absence of numbers. The examples we use in this paper might involve elements that could easily be quantified (rain drops, ink in a pen) but are given meaning through their display in a way that emphasises a quality or characteristic of the phenomenon. We recognise that this is potentially an ambiguous area, and are open to evolving the concept.

A possible spectrum of one dimension of qualitative displays: directness of connection

Here’s a tentative spectrum of one dimension of qualitative displays, relating phenomena to the display in terms of how directly they are connected.

(Levels 0—1 involve direct use of a real-world phenomenon in the display; from about Level 2 up to Level 5, they involve increasing degrees of translation or transduction of the phenomena. This parallels ideas in indexical visualisation [32] and embedded data representation [41] in terms of ‘situatedness’ or causal distance to phenomena.)

• Level 0: The phenomenon itself ‘creates’ the display directly
• Level 1: The display is an ‘accidental’ side-effect of the phenomenon
• Level 2: The side-effect is ‘incorporated’ into a display that gives it meaning
• Level 3: The display is a designed side-effect of the phenomenon
• Level 4: Some minor processing of the phenomenon creates the display
• Level 5: Major processing of the phenomenon creates the display

The boundaries between levels here are dependent on observers’ interpretations of what is signified (whether an effect is accidental or deliberate is a common question in design (teleonomy [25])). Nevertheless, this spectrum permits a classification of some examples and is being applied by the authors in undergraduate design studio projects. We note the absence of screen-based examples: this is not intentional, and we welcome adding relevant examples. There are many intersecting research areas we aim to explore; in current HCI research, the most relevant are data physicalisation, embedded data representation, tangible interaction, sonification, and glanceable displays.

The work of Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic and others [20] in data physicalisation, including compilation of examples, and embedded data representation [41], provides us with many instances of qualitative display, mostly at what we are calling Levels 2—5; likewise, development of ubiquitous computing, tangible interaction and tangible user interfaces [39, 18, 17] and Hiroshi Ishii’s subsequent vision of tangible bits [19] offers a huge set of projects, many of which provide qualitative interfaces for data or system interaction (usually at Levels 4—5).

Sonification [35] and glanceable displays [e.g. 9, 34] also offer us diverse sets of examples often using non-numerical representation, also largely at levels 4—5. As noted earlier, qualitative does not just mean non-quantitative, and the boundaries may be blurred: if a sonification directly maps numerical values to tones, is it much different to an unlabelled line chart? Or are sparklines [37], for example, a way of turning quantitative data into a form of qualitative presentation?

Even with a quantitative display, how a person interprets it may have a qualitative dimension: Figure 8 shows an electricity monitor used by a study participant [28] who accidentally set it to display kg CO2/day equivalent; this “meant nothing” to her but she interpreted the display such that “>1” meant “expensive”. ‘Annotations’ of values as users construct their own meaning [11] may fit here; the aim must, however, be to avoid the kind of reductive ‘qualitative’ nature of a limited set of labels [13].

Analogy and metaphor are important here, and the almost-forgotten field of Analogue Computing offers us an intriguing perspective. By “build[ing] models that created a mapping between two physical phenomena” [7], some analogue computers effectively operated as ‘direct’ displays of an analogue of the ‘original’ phenomenon—a kind of meta-level 2 type qualitative display, with devices such as the 1949 Phillips Machine [4] (Figure 9), which performed operations on flows of coloured water to model the economy of a country, enabling an interactive visualization of a system in operation as it operates (there are parallels with Bret Victor and Nicky Case’s work on explorable explanations [38, 8], and the development of visual programming languages).

Other areas of pertinent research and inspiration, are synaesthesia and mental imagery: sensory overlaps, fusions and mappings offer a fertile field for exploring qualitative displays of phenomena.

Conclusion: What use is all of this?

We’re interested in using qualitative displays and interfaces for supporting decision-making, behaviour change and new practices through enabling new forms of understanding—as an aid to help people explore their own and each other’s thinking, and specifically to help people understand their relationships and agency with the systems around them [26]. Projects using qualitative displays are unlikely simply to be de-quantified ‘conversion’ of existing numerical displays; instead, the aim will be to make use of the approach to represent and translate phenomena appropriately, in ways which enable users to construct meaning and afford new ways of understanding, enabling nuance and avoiding reductiveness.

The spectrum of the ‘directness’ dimension introduced here provides a possible starting point for this work, by giving a framework for analysing examples and suggesting ways of handling phenomena to be displayed, and is currently being used by the authors to brief an undergraduate design studio project on materialising environmental phenomena to reveal hidden relationships. We welcome the opportunity to learn from others who have thought about these kinds of ideas to inform our future explorations of this area.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Dr Laura Ferrarello, Flora Bowden, Gyorgyi Galik, Stacie Rohrbach, Ross Atkin, Shruti Grover, Veronica Ranner and Dixon Lo for discussions in which some of these ideas were formulated and explored, and to the CHI reviewers. Unless otherwise noted, photos are by the authors.

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This article originally appeared on the Carnegie Mellon School of Design website