I’m an industrial designer, engineer and researcher interested in human behaviour, environmentally sensitive design and engineering, the psychology of interaction with products/systems/environments, architecture and control, the relationship between technology and society, transportation (in many forms), mobility, digital rights, and widening the public’s practical understanding of technology.
Overall, this is about design for independence: reducing society’s resource dependence, reducing vulnerable users’ dependence on other people, and reducing users’ dependence on ‘experts’ to understand and modify the technology they own.
Doctoral research: Design for Sustainable Behaviour
In September 2007 I started a PhD at Brunel University’s School of Engineering & Design, Uxbridge, Middlesex, as a member of the Cleaner Electronics Research group, working on Design for Sustainable Behaviour, with Professors David Harrison and Neville Stanton.
Briefly, I’m applying what I’ve termed Design with Intent thinking in an ecodesign context: using design to change users’ interactions with products and systems, so that they are used in a more environmentally friendly manner (reducing whole-lifetime energy use, reducing waste generation, and so on). The aim is to test, practically, the relative effectiveness of different approaches (including ‘control’ versus ‘persuasion’ and ‘guidance’), within the context of consumer product technology, to produce a set of techniques, and a method for choosing between them, which will be useful to environmentally sensitive product designers, interaction designers and engineers.
[More details on the research]
I’ve also done a bit of teaching assistant work at Brunel - Level 2 Electronics labs (oscillators, amplifiers, etc) and marking - and have helped assess final-year Environmentally Sensitive Design group projects and presentations.
Professional experience
As an independent consultant, I’ve been engaged in lightweight transport and consumer product R&D for Sir Clive Sinclair (previously, I was a member of the team that developed the A-Bike and WDU) and have researched product/market segmentation and branding hierarchies for Tangerine.
Working as a freelancer has tended to involve carrying out a variety of short engineering, product and graphic design and business research projects for corporate and private clients - in various capacities, previous clients have included Mayhem UK, the Wilson Brothers, Daka Designs, Wright Fenn (now Pharma Engineering) and a number of individual inventors and entrepreneurs. Personal projects have included the development of Incluminate, an award-winning lighting backup system primarily intended for elderly or infirm people (patent applied for), a series of wheelchair drive prototypes, an electric conversion of a Reliant Fox (current project), and (one day) a Bond Minicar.
[Some design work (very out-of-date indeed)]
Writing and speaking
As part of my research, so far I’ve given presentations at Persuasive 2008 - with the paper published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science proceedings series - and New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living as well as a seminar at Brunel introducing the ‘Design with Intent’ concept to human factors researchers. I’ve also had a paper published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, for which I’m now a reviewer too. If you’d like me to write something for you, or talk at your event, please do get in touch.
In 2007 I wrote a substantial series of commissioned pieces for Inventor Resource intended to help inventors through the process of turning their ideas into businesses. My blog, Architectures of Control | Design with Intent, started in 2005, has a fairly diverse audience, collaboratively exploring a hitherto under-recognised field of design thinking and practice. As result of the blog, I’ve been asked to write one-off articles for a couple of other websites - the TAXI Design Network, and Ballardian.
I’m also the author of Rebel Without Applause (ISBN 1870519647), an analysis of the Reliant Motor Company’s history and its impact on automotive technology, published by Bookmarque in 2003, have contributed articles to magazines such as Engineering Designer, Original Tin and Gown, and the AROnline website; in addition, I co-edited Good Thinking [PDF link] (ISBN 190231641X), a handbook of innovative new technology products from young designers and engineers accompanying the show [PDF link] of the same name.
[Full list of articles, papers, presentations, etc.]
Background
From 2000-4 I studied Industrial Design Engineering at Brunel University’s former Runnymede design school at Englefield Green in Surrey, and then undertook a Cambridge-MIT Institute Master’s programme in Technology Policy at the Judge Institute of Management (now the Judge Business School), University of Cambridge, where I was a member of Downing College, from 2004-5. I was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in August 2008, and am also a graduate member of the Institution of Engineering Designers (IED), a member of the Design Research Society and the London chapter of Project H, and a student member of ACM SIGCHI, BCS Interaction and the Ergonomics Society.
I was born in 1982, grew up near Dawlish, Devon, went to school in Cockwood and in Exeter, and now live in a (kind of) New Brutalist flat in Windsor, Berkshire with my wonderful girlfriend Harriet, and a fantastically productive allotment, our first major project together. I drive a Reliant Scimitar SST, a Reliant Fox pick-up truck, and ride a Sinclair Research A-Bike from time to time. My aim is to leave the world in a better state than I found it.
dan@danlockton.co.uk | Daniel.Lockton@brunel.ac.uk | October 2008
I’m always open to meeting, talking to and collaborating with interesting and remarkable people. There are a lot of you out there; please do say hello.
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