
Dan LocktonNorwich University of the Arts · Institute for Sustainable Worlds
Dan Lockton
PhD
Design, Imagination, and Climate Futures
About
136
Publications
179,671
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Introduction
I'm a designer and researcher interested in links between design and how people understand the world, particularly in relation to society, the environment, and futures in an age of climate crisis.
I'm Associate Professor of Imagination & Climate Futures at TU Eindhoven, and also run the Imaginaries Lab, an ongoing project. I previously worked at Carnegie Mellon University, the Royal College of Art, University of Warwick, and Brunel University.
Additional affiliations
Education
September 2007 - June 2013
October 2004 - July 2005
September 2000 - July 2004
Brunel University, Runnymede, United Kingdom
Field of study
- Industrial Design Engineering
Publications
Publications (136)
'Energy' is an abstract concept, invisible except through its effects, yet with vast geopolitical and environmental consequences-while driving many everyday practices. It is a curious 'material' to work with for designers, with experiential properties which are underexplored. In Electric Acoustic, we are exploring both sonification and vibration (c...
Metaphors are important at multiple levels within design and society—from the specifics of interfaces, to wider societal imaginaries of technology and progress. Exploring alternative metaphors can be generative in creative processes, and for reframing problems strategically. In this pictorial we introduce an inspiration card workshop method using j...
This workshop explored how 'tangible thinking' tools can be used to materialise how people imagine and understand systems, in particular questions of (inter)disciplinarity. Thirty-five participants used three different kinds of tools—topological, relational, and performative—to construct physical models supporting group discussion around how we con...
Our everyday technologies could have appeared terrifying to our ancestors: instantaneous disembodied communication, access to knowledge, objects with ‘intelligence’ that talk to us (and each other). Black boxes and intangible entities are omnipresent in our homes and lives without our necessarily understanding the hidden flows of data, unknown agen...
Interaction designers tend to use quantification as a default to present information and a way to enable interactions with technologies. There is a notion that quantification is valued to be the most actionable and legitimate form of presentation, while our actual experiences of the world are largely qualitative. But can we design 'qualitative inte...
This chapter demonstrates the potential of design to address and investigate the complex socio-technical context of climate change. These possibilities are demonstrated by presenting a project using scenario-based design to question the current climate strategy in the Netherlands.
The project starts from the notion of climate-related emotions, such...
Artificial moral agents – systems that engage in explicit moral
reasoning on their own and with users – present a potential new
paradigm for behavior and system change for social and environ-
mental sustainability. Moral agents could replace current individual-
ist, prescriptive, inflexible, and opaque interventions with systems
that transparently...
This workshop explores the use of play to foster and support interdisciplinary connections and collaborations, in a systemic design context. We are developing creative prototype 'minigames' which address different aspects of the challenges faced in collaborations between disciplines, including facilitating collective imagination, surfacing worldvie...
Gregory Bateson's "Syllogism in Grass" expresses a form of abductive reasoning which can be used to generate and discuss metaphors, particularly in living systems and humans' interrelations with them. This paper explores tentatively the possibilities of the Syllogism in Grass in a systemic design context, as a creative method of provocation and ref...
What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fallout in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for...
The DRS 2022 track 'Valuing the Qualitative in Design and Data' features eleven accepted papers on topics including visualisation and physicalisation of qualitative data, the use of materials in this context, practical applications in design and education, and applications in personal informatics. In this editorial, the track chairs introduce the t...
In this paper, we explore the use of metaphors for people working with artificial intelligence, in particular those that support designers in thinking about the creation of AI systems. Metaphors both illuminate and hide, simplifying and connecting to existing knowledge, centring particular ideas, marginalising others, and shaping fields of practice...
DRS2022 is the biggest and most ambitious DRS conference to date. The conference brings together over 800 participants and 315 paper presentations which you can find in this volume of conference paper abstracts. DRS2022 extends the field of design research further outwards, bringing new perspectives to disciplines such as anthropology, politics, ec...
There have been recent calls for Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) to expand its reach and focus to address larger scale societal and global issues. An area of growing awareness is the issue of the gender data gap, whereby women are under-represented in research data, leading to inequitable outcomes when research findings are used to design real w...
Can creative methods drawn from design research practice be leveraged to help people think about, express, and discuss their own mental health? Tackling communication hurdles around mental health is a societal challenge which creative methods of inquiry are well placed to address: where verbal expression alone fails, the affordances of multisensory...
A variety of metaphors are commonly used in systemic design to make abstract concepts more concrete, externalised, and engageable-with, to enable constructs to be discussed and dealt with, and to generate new ideas. This practice builds on a long history of metaphor use in systems theory and cybernetics, and can involve a focus on language, drawing...
Worldviews are an important concept, inherent in one way or another in a number of frameworks and approaches related to systemic design, including Transition Design and Causal Layered Analysis, as well as broader cultural, political, philosophical and psychological perspectives. A worldview is, by some definitions, something along the lines of inte...
This dialogue proposal builds on two accepted short papers at RSD 10, ‘Making metaphors matter within SOD’ by Palak Dudani, and ‘Metaphors and Systems’ by Dan Lockton. We have collaborated to bring together some of the themes explored in our papers into a participatory format which we believe will be an engaging activity and
conversation at the con...
The word "robot" frequently conjures unrealistic expectations of utilitarian perfection: tireless, efficient, and flawless agents. However, real-world robots are far from perfect—they fail and make mistakes. Thus, roboticists should consider altering their current assumptions and cultivating new perspectives that account for a more complete range o...
(draft of a chapter from forthcoming Spooky Technology book by Katherine Giesa, Yiwei Huang, Catherine Yochum, Gordon Robertson, Meijie Hu, Miranda Luong, Christi Danner, Anuprita Ranade, Karen Escarcha, Lisa (Yip Yan) Yeung, Matthew Cruz, Elizabeth Wang, edited by Daragh Byrne and Dan Lockton)
One common thread across many of the projects include...
[EDIT: ResearchGate added this automatically, and it's an 'Early Access' version IEEE posted, that has various errors in it. Also ResearchGate has the wrong journal. I'll update this with the right version, and an OA preprint, once it's published properly.]
This article explores the relatively underexplored potential for physicalisations to materi...
Perhaps one of the most highly 'situated' forms for Research through Design is where the context is personal—autoethnographic inquiry. In this short pictorial we discuss five tools which enable forms of self-inquiry around sleep and wellbeing, created by undergraduate designers to investigate bedtime routines, personal scheduling of time, focus, sl...
Autoethnographic and other first-person research methods are a topic of increasing interest in design and HCI. This focus parallels the boom in self-tracking and personal informatics, perhaps most intriguingly in the intersection of quantitative and qualitative data and the noticing of patterns in one's own life and everyday wellbeing. But how can...
Position paper for DIS 2020 workshop: Susan Lechelt, Katerina Gorkovenko, Luis Soares, Chris Speed, James K. Thorp, Michael Stead (2020). Designing for the End of Life of IoT Objects. DIS 2020, online, July 2020.
This short pictorial explores some combinations of adaptors as a way of thinking about Internet of Things devices.
There is much work in the CHI community about the 'industry-academia divide', and how to bridge it. One key crossover between HCI/UX scientists and practitioners is the development and use of tools and methods-boundary objects between academia and practice. Among other forms of collaboration, there is an underdeveloped opportunity for academics to...
This position paper for the CHI 2020 workshop, "Embracing Uncertainty in HCI" (Robert Soden, Laura Devendorf, Richmond Wong, Lydia Chilton, Ann Light, Yoko Akama) briefly explores how uncertainty can work as a generative practice in design, through examples of card decks, metaphors, intentional apophenia, and following a dog's wanderings.
Contemporary WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) design software utilizes digital Artboards which are finite graphics frames that sit atop a scrollable zooming canvas; where many graphics frames can be arbitrarily arranged, scaled and duplicated to explore and juxtapose design ideas. Despite creative practitioners increasingly writing code to ex...
A component of design research for change that has been underexplored by designers focused primarily on changing behaviour, is the potential to use design methods to investigate how people think. In particular, the metaphors, mental imagery, and other forms of imaginaries which influence how people act and make sense of the world, individually, and...
Use data physicalization to enable data and relationships to be
visualized, experienced, and understood in new ways, and to inspire
new kinds of interface and interaction design.
Design can be used intentionally to influence people’s behavior,
translating insights from different disciplines into design techniques
applicable to interfaces, products, services, and environments.
Designers can use metaphors to investigate how people understand
concepts, help them understand in new ways, and generate new ideas.
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 uncer...
Las “visiones de futuros sostenibles” se han propuesto como un componente clave del diseño para la transición, “un medio a través del cual los estilos de vida contemporáneos y las intervenciones de diseño pueden evaluarse y criticarse contra la visualización de un futuro deseado” (Irwin et al, 2015a, p. 8). Tales ambiciones son necesariamente de am...
A metaphor is just a way of expressing one idea in terms of another. This project is a nightmare. The city is a playground. You are a gem. Creating new metaphors could help us design new kinds of product, service, or experience, and even help us think about and
understand the world differently.
New Metaphors is a set of 150 cards (two different ki...
This track sought to contribute to design’s potential to shift, redirect and transform power relations to achieve sustainability. We sought to direct attention to the political potential in and politics of transition design with a focus on the many ways that power flows through the systems in which design operates. Our intention was to address, dir...
What could someone else's sense of dread look like, if you could hold it in your hands? Could you build a model landscape representing your own career path? This paper illustrates projects using participant-created artefacts to materialise abstract concepts and externalise thoughts, concretising or reifying intangible phenomena, and argues that thi...
While the subject of synaesthesia has inspired various practitioners and has been utilized as a design material in different formats, research has not so far presented a way to apply this captivating phenomenon as a source of design material in HCI. The purpose of this paper is to explore the translative property of synaesthesia and introduce a tan...
In this paper we introduce the concept of Phone as an Emotive AI sidekick through a set of novel interactions where in a multi-axis actuated robotic charging stand we made acts as a 'body' for the AI on our phones. The novel interactions begin with how the robotic platform embodies and thus communicates our devices' understanding of the world, cont...
This forum highlights conversations at the intersection of design methods and social studies of technology. By highlighting a diversity of perspectives on design interventions and programs, we aim to forge new connections between HCI design and communication, science and technology studies, and media studies scholarship. --- Daniela Rosner, Editor
Knots, a 1970 book by the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, is based around a collection of patterns of human thinking, metacognition, and theory of mind, drawn from real experience with patients but turned into abstracted examples. The approach has the potential to be adapted into a range of formats which enable systemic design phenomena such as r...
This document brings together materials produced for and during the one-day PhD by Design Satellite Session taking place as part of DRS2018 on June 25, as well as the remaining DRS conference running June 26-28, 2018, Limerick, Ireland. In line with the DRS2018 theme of 'Catalyst', the PhD by Design Satellite Session explored how design can be a ca...
The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is the essential tool of the clinical consultation, effectively replacing the paper medical record.
Since its gradual adoption in the early 2000s there has been a
failure to achieve even moderate levels of EMR usability in clinical settings, resulting in a negative impact on clinical care, time efficiency and p...
The Designing for Transitions track at DRS 2018 encompasses emerging approaches to design research at the intersection of sustainable design and sociotechnical systems theory. Exemplary are the growing international research communities explicitly centred around Transition Design (e.g. Irwin et al 2015) and Systemic Design (e.g. Sevaldson 2017), ai...
Many emerging technologies, products and services today try to use diverse methods of interaction to provide playful experiences. Increasingly more interactive features and techniques are being introduced to afford users new experiences and enrich our living environment. While many of these playful experiences can be achieved through various types...
Visions of sustainable futures have been proposed as a key component of transition design, offering a way for today's situations and design proposals to be compared and critiqued in the light of desired future states. Such ambitions are necessarily wide-ranging, and call for drawing together strands on design and speculation from diverse sources. H...
As we move toward commercial usage of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, it is important to think about how computing should communicate with us when it is distributed in our environment. This paper proposes that qualitative indexical visualizations based on learned understanding of physical phenomena (Experiential Augmentation) can enhanc...
Intentionally seeing patterns and drawing links or making metaphors between ostensibly unrelated phenomena could be a method for generative creativity for disruptive improvisation. This paper discusses 'no-technology' ways to create ideas for new interfaces through self-imposed constraints, and offers an event score for a kind of deliberate apophen...
Printerface proposes a visual design technique to create customized and interactive icons that may be applied to paper or textile substrates. The icons are screen printed electroluminescent (EL) and conductive inks. Research in the field of printed electronics traditionally uses either dot-matrix or multiple capacitive buttons for interaction. Curr...
Introduction
Many GUM clinics have shifted from paper to Electronic Patient Records (EPR). While paper has limitations, its natural functionality – e.g. free-form writing, sketching and page-turning – is intuitive and easy to exploit. EPR promises so much, but how easy or intuitive is it in current clinical GUM practice?
Methods
A mixed methods pa...
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 ar...
Design and sustainability are enmeshed. Many visions of a sustainable future assume large-scale changes in human behaviour, in tandem with scientific advances. A major component of this is design which relates to people’s actions: the design of products, services, environments and systems plays an important role in affecting what people do, now and...
Much of what we see in the exhibits curated for DESIGN AND VIOLENCE is a kind of frustration on the part of the designers, or those who brief them — a frustration that the world is not how they want it to be, or more specifically, people do not act how they ‘should’ do.
Design for sustainable behaviour necessarily involves a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on insights around human action from multiple fields, and making them relevant to designers. This chapter explores some considerations which build on these multidisciplinary concepts, around questioning assumptions and understanding people’s lives better,...
Influencing energy use is a major research topic. However, many approaches lump ‘energy demand’ together, disconnected from everyday artefacts, the realities of household life, and people’s diverse understandings of the systems around them. There is an opportunity for research through design which addresses relationships with the invisible concept...
In the project SusLabNWE the integration of users in private households was a vital part of the concept and scientific approach because products and services need to be aligned to the user needs and fitted to their behaviour. In order to develop, design and implement innovative products that serve their purpose and are accepted by users, a high lev...
The chapter reports on a participatory drawing research study conducted by the Royal College of Art within the SusLabNWE project. It sought to explore people’s notions of energy and to visualise their ideas and associations relating to it. The study is framed within the context of the broader ethnographic research tools that were employed by the Su...
Over the last decade, design for behaviour change has become increasingly recognised as a strategy for enabling social change. Despite this, we are far from understanding its implementation, especially through the private and public sectors. This study has surveyed private and public sector stakeholders with regard to their current knowledge of, an...
In the last decades, much design research around “future-focused thinking” has come to prominence in relation to changes in human behaviour, at different scales, from the Quantified Self, to visions of smart cities, to Transition Design. The design of products, services, environments and systems plays an important role in affecting what people do,...
This paper explores certain dimensions of designers' roles within transition design, in particular, the nature of imagined futures and visions, models of human behaviour, mindsets and human agency. These are aspects drawn from the provocations offered to Transition Design symposium participants, but the paper also responds to, and builds on, issues...