Speculative Design, Design Fiction, Game Design, Design as Rhetoric, Design Philosophy, Research through Design, Design Futures, More-Than Human Centered Design, Play, Toys
Paul is the Chair of Speculative and Game Design within Imagination and the School of Design. His practice uses research through design to create experiential futures which deliberately mix a present experience with a speculative future that are concretised by combining immersive scenarios with artefacts produced as design fictions or speculative designs. His work has helped establish a particular form of Speculative Design; Design Fiction, as a research method exploring futures for areas such as the Internet of Things and Artificial intelligence. His current research focusses on more-than-human design to expand design approaches so that they play greater consideration to human and non-human actants within the complex assemblages in which new product and services exist particularly in relation to sustainability and climate change.
“Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.” – Buckminster Fuller
New Paper in Design Journal
New journal paper on Design Fiction as a Breaching Experiment
We are delighted to announce Permission to Muck About, a feature length documentary film about Design Research
Report by Nigel Thompson, 8 March 2024
Immersive Technology Meeting @ House of Commons
Travels with the Future Mundane
Edge of Reality and Edge of Tomorrow Projects visit British Science Festival and the V&A's Digital Design Weekend
Future Mundane @ Ethical Dilemma Cafe as part of Mozilla Festival 2022 in Manchester
Imagination researchers are going to DRS 2022 in Bilbao
New paper published in the International Journal of Business Systems Research.
New paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
Future Mundane @ Liverpool World Museum
Paper published in The State of Responsible IoT 2020: From Good Things to Good Systems
WEF State of Connected World 2020 Edition
Building a caravan of the future during a pandemic
Final Reports
Mixed Reality Lab Update from Tom Lodge
Socio-Technical Design Research for 21st Century Technologies
Using icon design to explore the issues around widespread adoption of AI
Research vsit to EINA, Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona.
Local Trade is a Catalyst launch pad to create a system which records trading patterns within the local trading economy of Lancaster.
Local Trade – Local Wealth NFC cards.
A new version of the Living Room of the Future (LRofTF) was presented at Tate Modern on the 8th and 9th of February as part of the PETRAS living in the Internet of Things by Prof Paul Coulton, Dr Adrian Gradinar, and Dr Joe Lindley.
We will be presenting a new version of the AHRC funded research project Objects of Immersion in the form of the Living Room of the Future with BBC R&D as part of the Digital Design Weekend 22-23 Sept 2018
Our research using Design Fiction to consider futures for the Internet of Things is featured by IOTUK
As part of our project on House Training the Internet of Things which contributes to the acceptability and adoption stream of PETRAS we have been considering the use of voice interfaces as the medium through which users’ accesses Internet of Things devices
The convergences of Cemore's interest on playful methods with the design ethos of Imagination were too many to let pass an opportunity for meaningful conversation. We went for a ‘play date’ that mix sociology and design research through methods like design fictions, board and body games, and playful experiments
Imagination research conducted as part of the PETRAS project Adoption and Acceptability theme was recently presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
New ways of telling stories
New EPSRC Project illustrating Imagination Research in Design Fiction
Last week I gave a talk to the Computer Arts Society that presented a design manifesto for using games as speculative designs through which players might explore scenarios that represent plausible alternative presents and speculative futures
As part of a research project based in Imagination we have been working on a game called COLD SUN and we are now seeking people to play the game over the course of a week
The CEDE installations at St Peter's De Beauvoir Town Church have been cited in relation to the argument for WiFi to be installed in every Church of England Church
BBC R&D video released for European Data Protection Day
The interactive systems we developed as part of our project on Digital Empathy for St Peter De Beauvoir Town Church in Hackney are featured on BBC Click
As part of the ongoing ‘Beyond the Castle’ project, Lancaster City and County Councils will be running an intensive hack day in Lancaster Castle at the end of this month
The code base produced as part of the BARTER project is being released Open Source so that other communities can benifit from the research
Using augmented reality to curate your own art exhibitions
How will traditional media such as television and radio adapt as they become part of a larger Internet of Things
An Inspirational Masterclass delivered by the Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Roberts on Monday 10th of February
Making in the City [3D Printing], offered a successful and acclaimed introduction to the series of Cities Design Jams, by the Imagination team at Lancaster
Co-creation through intense collaborative activity...Hexagons and Lego leading innovative 'thinking'
Bringing London-based digital and creative small and medium businesses together to create innovate concepts for cities
How do you visulaise 2.5 billion calls and text messages exchanged between 5 million users?
Augmented Reality Prototype Demo Ready!
NuBlue are providing free hosting for BARTER to log research data in the cloud
Use this Augmented Reality application to find scarecrows hidden in both space and time throughout your local environment. These scarecrows are from the annual scarecrow festival held in the village of Wray in Lancashire in the UK
ScareBot unveiled at the 2013 Wray Scarecrow Festival
Down in the lab scarebot rises from the slab!
Fabrication of main digital scarecrow parts done!
Interview with Samuel Fry about the Taking the Artwork Home project
Looking at rapid manufacturing and 3D printing this conference presentation explores the issues fro the design profession and draws comparisons with the aspirations of the Arts and Crafts movement, radical design groups such as Archigram and presents a set of conceptual tools to provoke further discussion
A two day workshop at Lancaster University in December 2007 brought together a diversity of people to pathfind the Environment 2.0 research agenda and future activity
The Right to Repair and Equal-IoT
Creating a community-run mobile app in Brazil
Experiencing Data (Un)Sustainability
Exploring the Legibility of AI
Socio-Technical Design Research for 21st Century Technologies
Design Research for the 21st Century
Scarebot and scARecrow Time Machine
Digital Curation Through Mobile Augmented Reality
Enabling children and young people at the margins of society to tell their own stories
Worlds First NFC Mixed Reality Game
Creating Innovative People for Radical Change
Location based iPhone game exploring user generated content
An investigation into emerging approaches to visualising, interpreting and using data
Creating New Contexts for Growth in the Experience Economy
How do we unlock the digital communication of empathy?
The first crowdsourcing jukebox to use NFC technology
moBile sociAl netwoRking supporTing local Ethical tRading
Privacy, Ethics, Trust, Reliability, Acceptability, and Security
EPSRC Project Highlighting Imagination Research in Design Fiction
For all your future Design Fiction needs!
AHRC Immersive Experiences Project with BBC, University of Nottingham and FACT
This £1.5 million EPSRC funded 4 year project examines the role of new technology in citizen led innovation looking specifically at Manchester and Derry as sites of innovation. The project includes innovation researchers from Computing, Design Sociology and management, all based in Lancaster University.