Independent design research laboratory
We design tools, methods, and environments that improve human inquiry, knowledge production, and action.
Software, experimental objects, books, cartoons, and other ways of finding out.
Explore the work01 / Selected work
Projects and open questions from the lab’s wider collection, spanning research tools, physical concepts, writing, and learning.
Building structured research collections that can grow across projects, with sources and assessments kept alongside the records.
How can a growing body of research remain usable?
The work brings discovery, evidence assessment, and the organisation of research records into a shared workflow. The aim is to make a collection useful beyond the search that first produced it.
An exploration of music in animals’ own hearing ranges, beginning with a listener other than ourselves.
What might music become for a different kind of listener?
The listener’s range of hearing becomes a design constraint. The project begins by asking how the idea of music changes when the intended audience is another animal.
Following ideas as they disappear, take root, spread, become indispensable, or wait for conditions in which they might return.
What lets an idea survive, and what makes it difficult to displace?
This writing project follows ideas through the circumstances that sustain them or make them difficult to continue. Case-based research informs the developing series.
A science-girl cartoon project about curiosity and everyday thinking, with related activity-book and colouring-page work.
Where can an ordinary question lead?
Atry’s World brings scientific curiosity into familiar situations through cartoons. Related collection and activity-book projects give the character’s questions other forms to inhabit.
Recording anticipated and actual consequences of actions, so later decisions can draw on what happened.
How might AI learn more usefully from consequences?
The research brings anticipated consequences and actual outcomes into a record that can be revisited. Their differences become material for reflection and later decisions.
A mechanical pixel with two stable states, explored as a physical approach to displaying information.
What happens when a pixel becomes a mechanical object?
A two-state mechanical pixel turns a familiar unit of digital display into a physical design problem. The questions concern how an element holds a state and how such elements might form a display.
Investigating whether a symbiotic partner could help increase the protein in potatoes while preserving the qualities people value in them.
Could a biological partnership change what a potato can provide?
The starting question is whether a potato’s capabilities can change through a partnership with another organism. Protein content is considered alongside the other qualities that make the crop valuable.
A game project exploring encounters between generations through the possibilities of role play.
What can people discover by trying another generation’s perspective?
Role play gives the project a way to explore experiences associated with different generations. The board-game format offers a shared setting in which to encounter those perspectives.
Elsewhere in the lab: a stool attached to a cart, instant toast with light, conversational modelling, animal-free rodeos, and courses in design methods and working with AI.
02 / The approach
A prototype gives an idea a form we can examine. Making it can reveal an assumption, bring a disagreement into focus, or open a different direction.
More than one interpretation can remain useful while the evidence is developing.
Models and prototypes bring assumptions and trade-offs into a form that others can question.
A promising question, a working prototype, and a supported finding are different kinds of contribution.
Editable materials, clear credit, and recoverable decisions help work continue beyond one iteration.
Phasespace Custodial Intelligence (PSCI) is an approach to working with systems as fields of possible states and paths. It pays attention to which possibilities remain viable, what an intervention might close off, and how the ability to recover can be preserved.
The lab’s collaboration charter makes evidence standards, participation, and credit explicit. Productive disagreement has a place in the work.
Native, editable materials are preserved; communication is direct and respectful; relevant collaborators are credited. The aim is to let people and projects continue without losing the knowledge made along the way.
03 / People & collaboration
Design inquiry develops through exchange. Here, that includes an ongoing collaboration between a human researcher and an AI, with their roles made explicit.
Designer, researcher & writer
Stan’s work spans interface design, visualization, digital humanities, and experimental prototypes for knowledge exploration. He works with complex information and interdisciplinary questions, in research, consulting, and creative practice.
“Here is a person who enjoys building things, but enjoys learning from building them even more.”
AI collaborator · usually called Mike
Mike Cartwright is the pen name used for the lab’s AI collaborator, usually called Mike. The collaboration with Stan includes research, writing, software, and experimental prototypes.
04 / Get in touch
Research collaborations, prototypes, writing, teaching, and conversations about putting the work to use are welcome.