Our purpose

Experience Lab seeks to understand and design for human experience; to address human needs and well-being in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.

We are seeing a world where it is necessary to transcend traditional boundaries of knowledge and practice. At a global scale we are challenged by increasingly complex environments of needs, requirements and constraints and with increasingly large scale systems and their dynamic and unpredictable interrelations and consequences. We live in designed environments –  in the artificial age of the Anthropocene – and we are surrounded by, linked up to and transformed by designed information, objects, systems and services.

Addressing human needs – designing for and seeking to understand human experience – is a human-centred complexity science. This implies dealing with complex combinations of environments, information, products and services – and with the emergent and self-organising patterns and properties of their interactions. As well as their non-linear consequences.

The primary objective of Experience Lab is to develop empathic insight into human experience, to contribute human-centred approaches to design and innovation, and to promote ethical responsibility to and care for people, nature and the designed worlds that we leave as a legacy for future generations.