WHAT WE ARE.
We seek to understand and enhance the role that design and designers play in social change.
WHO WE ARE.
We want to research genuinely inclusive social change together.
CO-RESEARCHING SPACE
O-lab is located at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Room 2.415. We invite all students, researchers and practitioners to make use of our facilities, including:
- Hosting project meetings with team mates and project partners over coffee in Kopi-O.
- Using one of our flexi desks to get some quiet work done in O-Focus.
- Prototyping and testing ideas with our library of materials and tools in O-Make.
- Presenting and generating ideas together on the whiteboard walls in O-Talk.
- Borrowing equipment to conduct field research from O-Store.
RESEARCH COMMONS
The O-Lab research commons provides support for academics, students and professionals to practice, study and enhance genuinely inclusive approaches to design. To support people to contribute to the commons we are developing different ways to explore creative freedoms in their own lives. Currently these include webapps, design workshops, interactive installations and training courses. We are keen to develop different media to build the knowledge of the commons and welcome opportunities for collaborations which make it accessible to new users, different contexts and unique experiences of social change.
WHAT WE BELIEVE.
people are good
We make sense of the world around us by asking questions which either confirm or change our understanding of the world. The questions we ask are informed by our values and we perceive ourselves to be ‘good’ if the response to our questions confirm what we already know. The questions we ask during moments of change can therefore help to reveal our unique interests and concerns
change is inevitable
Considering the number of opportunities for questioning that we encounter throughout our lives there are many moments where the response to our questions do not align with our existing values. Inevitably in these cases we change our perceptions of the world and the way we interact with it. These moments of great creative opportunity require everyone we interact with to have access to an equal range of creative freedoms
connections evolve
The web of questions we encounter during different moments of social change evolve into patterns of interactions which either support or restrict creative freedom. If we can identify these patterns of creative exchange – and understand how they work – we can begin to work towards increasing each other’s creative competence, control, and initiative, limited only by each other’s claims to an equal range of creative freedom.