Areas of research


My work covers the links between design, understanding, and people's actions, particularly with respect to what's become known as 'design for behaviour change' for social and environmental benefit, across products, services and environments. Much of the practical application of this work has been around energy use, and design for sustainable behaviour more generally, via contextual ethnographic research, participatory design, and trials of novel interfaces and forms of information communication.

I'm increasingly interested in what might be termed public understanding of everyday systems: how we interpret, understand and interact with the infrastructures, technologies and complex systems around us—from the Internet of Things to 'smart cities' to government—how those systems in turn model us, and what the consequences could be for design which seeks to influence change. This takes an approach combining elements of cybernetics, cognitive ergonomics and naturalistic decision making research. I'm also interested in patterns across domains, including the use of pattern languages, toolkits and other methods for representing and exploring complexity and possibility in design and creativity processes.

Research projects


Coming soon.

Research publications


Links to selected publications, categorised roughly by topic:

Design for behaviour change /
Design for sustainable behaviour
Energy and sustainability People, systems and understanding Participatory and community-led design Transport history
   

PhD supervision

In Innovation Design Engineering at the RCA, I'm a supervisor for:

  • Delfina Fantini van Ditmar: The Internet of Dwelling
  • Nazlı Gökçe Terzioğlu: Towards Sustainable Production and Consumption: Design Research into Small Kitchen Appliances
  • Chang Hee Lee: Synaesthesia Materialisation: Synaesthetic Inputs within the Product Design Industry
  • Dave Pao: Simulacra of the Psyche: Brokering the Doctor-Patient Conversation
  • Hugo Glover: Stereoscopic Spatiality: A Practice-based Investigation into the Use of Stereoscopic 3D‐Depth Technologies in Physical and Digital Space

I'm interested in supervising research in any of the areas outlined above, particularly where it combines design practice with multidisciplinary perspectives on understanding, or more nuanced approaches to 'behaviour change'. Please do get in touch—dan@danlockton.co.uk