Imagine now, imagine later — interview with Dan Lockton
Dan Lockton is an interaction designer and researcher, whose playground is wherever humans reach beyond the obvious.
With his creative yet methodical and intentional work, Dan brings out the unexpected but often deeply embedded assumptions and beliefs that ultimately influence what kind of futures we are building and empowering as designers — all in the service of humankind and the biggest questions.
Product designer turned Design researcher
You chose to leave product design to become a design researcher in order to focus on the bigger picture. How is it going?
I miss it a bit. I miss making things, which was a big part of being a designer, prototyping things, I do miss some of that. But I think ultimately it’s probably better to be able to look at some of the bigger questions about how design and technology affect society.
I don’t think I’d have been happy if I was just modeling injection molded plastic parts for the rest of my life, which was a big part of being a product designer. I was always much more interested in how these things fit into people’s lives or if it is even a good idea in the first place to design them.
Do you think that the method kits you designed, like the Design with Intent toolkit or the New Metaphors kit, are a manifestation of this desire to make things?
Yes, completely. The feeling of having a thing that you can give people or you can share with people and see them using it and prototype and improve it and so on. It feels closer to being a product designer.
And what happens after you’ve put your kit out into the world? How do you observe people working with them?
I’m always interested in what people do with them and how they use them.
There are a couple of projects I’m involved with at present where we’re designing or producing kits for groups of people to inspire different ways to collaborate.
We’ve got one project called Playing with the Trouble which is going to end up with a series of small games. There is another called Unbox, which is specifically about using physical metaphors in group collaboration in projects, often between people from different disciplines. It’s essentially a kit with various objects that you can use to explore different ways of thinking.
It’s not necessarily studying how people use them, but it’s studying that in quite an open way — Do people do something unusual with it? Do they modify it? Or do they not find some of it useful at all, but find other things useful?
I’m more interested in that than in the controlled trial of Does it lead to a certain percentage more ideas? or something like that. I started going down that route when I was doing my PhD, but in practice, it’s not that interesting to know that 5% of people do a particular thing differently.
It’s much more interesting to know what they do differently, how they do it differently, why, or what it leads them to think of. The qualitative aspects of how people use these kinds of tools.
Is this where the transformative play also comes into the spotlight?
This is something that I’ve fallen into by collaborating with people who do much more work on these kinds of questions of play and games and transformation. I’ve come to be an enthusiast.
I’m interested in things where people’s viewpoint changes or people have those moments of actually if I look at it this way, maybe it’s different or maybe there’s another way of thinking about it.
Anything that can do that while framing things as being about play or something that’s more open or more creative can be a way to lower some of the barriers to feeling that it’s OK to think differently or to see things differently. If it’s presented as a very serious method or approach, it scares people off in a way.
How do you imagine your future?
How does this tie to your work on imagining the future? How do you envision the role of designers in shaping sustainable futures?
I think that questions about how people imagine the future, or even the present are actually really important. We don’t always realize how people imagine their own future, what the future could be like for them, or what other assumptions are not questioned.
It does affect the sorts of things people do. For example where I work — it’s a technical university. There’s a certain worldview embedded in a lot of the decisions that are made. Like that, the future is obviously going to involve robots and AI everywhere, technology being the main solution to humanity’s problems. And that’s not often said explicitly, but it’s very apparent in the decisions. If you reverse engineer what actually happens, it is very much along those lines.
And so anything that can help people surface or materialize or even realize that kind of current worldview or their imaginaries of the system they’re in, can be a really good starting point for imagining different worlds and futures.
Is there a community aspect to it?
The community aspect would be basically doing it together or realizing together that we think in some different ways of oh, you think that but you think that about what I think, but actually I think this or even I’ve never questioned that before.
To me, a part of the community aspect is that design methods or design tools can be a really good way of helping people kind of externalize and materialize those sort of hidden or often abstract imaginaries of things, and put them in a form where others can learn from it, share it, or question it.
What is your view on well-known imaginaries, such as sci-fi movies or other bits of pop culture?
I’m probably a kind of sci-fi nerd to some extent but I’m much more interested in speculative fiction and climate fiction. Things that have a much more social, cultural, or even psychological dimension than something that’s just about another planet.
There are not that many images of the future in Western society that haven’t come from either Hollywood movies or well-known sci-fi. And so many of our images of the future come from the window of mid-century, mostly post-Second World War images of particular views. We’ll live on Mars and there’ll be flying cars and robots and so on. And I think it’s a really narrow set of visions, but those dominate what kind of popular culture around the future is. And it doesn’t have to be that at all.
So I’m really interested in opening up many more visions of what other imaginaries of what the future could be like. But also I think we can learn a lot from how those existing visions made their way into our minds and into culture without us necessarily realizing or reflecting on it explicitly.
You mentioned that we can get imaginaries in a participative way, not just prescribed top-down by governments or designers. Then where do we as designers fit into this exchange?
I think I’m sort of coming to realize that a lot of the value of designers in this setting is almost as facilitators.
And I don’t just mean the “here are some post-it notes”.
There’s something in the way that the tools or methods that designers often make for themselves. For example during the process of designing something, prototyping things, trying them out, not designing everything perfectly, and then making it. The idea of iteration and partial prototyping and seeing what happens.
I think those kinds of methodologies — not necessarily the specific methods, but the kind of the reasoning behind the methods — can actually be a really good way to facilitate other people to share their ideas or to come up with ideas in the first place.
So part of that is about using design methods to help people explore their own imaginaries, like their own current ways of thinking.
We’ve done experiments around things like energy, for example, asking people to draw what they think energy looks like, an abstract concept. “Ask me to draw it” — there’s not really much method there. But presenting it in a way where people feel comfortable sharing something like that probably wouldn’t come about in quite the same way if it was a sociologist or a cognitive psychologist doing the study. They might use text much more, which might be better for analysis purposes than having hundreds of drawings of how people have imagined things. But I think there’s something about creative methods.
The design approaches can be valuable partly to prompt people to think in different ways, but also by having examples. Such as materializing some of those ideas or sharing them quite quickly, or enabling people to experience other people’s ideas through prototypes or through creating experiences.
When it comes to this kind of prompting, how do you set the stage for this? Is there, for example, an underlying assumption, such as things are going to work out for humanity or that we are all destined for doom in light of the current societal crises?
Both have their place.
We need to explore what it is that people perceive to be dystopian or utopian. What is it that people are scared of, worried, or hopeful about? We have a lot of very dystopian visions of the future. That’s understandable because in some ways it’s easier to like those stories, they are more intriguing. The majority of fiction is about something bad happening in some way and either people trying to fix it or not.
But stories that are only about something positive happening seem to be much less engaging for people at least. Or if they are, then they’re presented in a form that is about helping lift people out of a feeling of despair.
So we kind of need both. Ultimately, I’m interested in helping people create visions that are positive, desirable for them, and are actually achievable in some way. But I don’t discount the value of quite dystopian things as being a way to prompt people to reflect.
Also, there are plenty of people in parts of the Global South or small islands or other places where at present, for example, the climate crisis is already experienced.
Things that may seem to many people in Europe or North America as doom scenarios where cities are flooded, crops fail, or extreme temperatures — that’s already happening to a lot of people. I think there’s also something about showing some of these dystopian visions. It’s quite a privilege in a way to be able to say, well, wouldn’t it be terrible if I didn’t have enough to eat?
There are a lot of people who already do not have enough to eat.
There’s a famous MoMA blog post around speculative design and critical design, where people in the comments argued around the value of ‘dystopian’ speculative design projects created from a position where the designers themselves would probably never have to experience that dystopia while in fact there are plenty of people currently who experiencing real dystopias.
So there are pros and cons to this approach. If it brings some awareness of that to people who are in a more privileged position, then it’s probably quite a good thing, but we shouldn’t do it naively.
In terms of the dystopian scenarios, do you think that there is an element of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the designers could leverage?
There are definitely self-fulfilling prophecies with so many things.
Once an idea is in the world in a form that’s easy to share, then it becomes perhaps much more likely that people will take action in response to it somehow.
So I would like to get to a point where we have hopeful, desirable visions of much more inclusive, much more just futures that are in a form that’s shareable and is something that people can fulfill, they can prefigure it, they can start doing it now. Then we’d be on a much better track towards it actually happening. I think we should make use of the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect in a way like well let’s prefigure it.
Let’s actually do it now.
Or let’s make it something that people can really get behind and align with.
Once an idea is introduced into the kind of public consciousness or people’s imaginaries, it’s much more likely that it will spread I think.
This reminds me of something I read — that the a great way to inspire kids to pursue a certain profession is to make a once-in-a-lifetime movie about it.
That’s pretty good because it will affect how people think and probably become the vision that they imagine when they think about that career.
So, if we had some more movies or maybe very strong social media examples — I don’t know what young people today are most inspired by — but having good examples of these things in the world does definitely help.
Like role models for a possible future for yourself or for anyone.
To imagine or to be imagined?
Your work revolves around bridging the gap between emerging technologies and people’s everyday lives. What was the past year of this work like, with the release of ChatGPT and other examples of Generative AI?
It’s been interesting seeing how people use them. I don’t know what to think about a lot of these things. I’ve enjoyed experimenting with some of them, but it’s really difficult because I can already see how particularly the image generators are sort of changing the way that design students work.
There are definitely students who are finding interesting ways to use them that are actually quite critical and exploratory or they’re treating them like a way to look up what the sort of existing models think certain things, almost as a way of creatively critiquing them.
If you ask Midjourney or Dall-E for an image of what it thinks the future city looks like, then you can use that as a way to query visually the past imaginaries or at least those that the models have been trained on.
So future cities either look sort of very shiny or they are gray and blue or look very green and kind of solar punk or sort of terrifying. But there were not many images of futures that are an image of a small village in a rural area. I think you can use them as a sort of resource to understand the collective previous imaginaries in culture.
Are there any research questions that you are pondering in this context?
The thing I’m interested in is how, for example, community groups or groups who don’t necessarily have that much power in society, could make use of some of these tools to produce visions that are very plausible, impressive, and professional. At present, they don’t and they have previously not had the power to do so.
A property developer in the past could pay architects or illustrators to produce these beautiful visions of a particular new development. A community group who had an alternative view, probably couldn’t afford to produce things of a similar standard, but now they can. They could produce very different visions that are much more radical, that have a different style, relatively easily using some of these AI tools.
I’m really interested to know what that does to the power structures in some of these situations. Not just with planning issues, but also in society more widely.
How will this influence the balance of power, especially in the context of the $20 monthly bill that comes with the use of these tools nowadays?
I’m particularly interested in people training their own models or not just using the existing tools. There are some interesting projects coming out where people train the models using the same approach but on different datasets of images.
There’s work on, for example, some communities in West Africa, training models that are much more focused on their own realities. Again so that an image of a future city doesn’t just produce default in a Western sense, but produces something much closer to what it’s likely to be in a different place.
So it’s not necessarily about just using the existing commercial tools, it’s more about learning from what they do and applying that in more kind of open source or perhaps more activist ways.
Since Midjourney, DALL-E, and other models are based on existing data, they are essentially embedding the past. What impact do you think this will have on our collective and participatory imagination?
It’s a good question because it can’t embed future data, so it’s only gonna be backward-looking in a way.
I think it will become a fascinating question to see what you can do that is different.
What can you do that is actually not predictable by those models or that inspires particular forms of creativity that are maybe not captured by past-oriented models?
Thank you very much, Dan, for generously sharing details about your projects and your valuable insights! Click here to find out more about Dan's work.
